Oct. 8, 2002 – Leuven, Belgium – IMEC, a European independent research center for microelectronics and enabling technologies for ICT systems, announced that Xilinx Inc. has joined its new industrial affiliation program (IIAP) that focuses on technology for reconfigurable systems.

Xilinx, a provider of complete programmable logic solutions, is the first organization to join the IIAP. Through this program, IMEC will be applying its expertise in design technology for reconfigurable computing platforms to Xilinx FPGAs.

Over the last three years, IMEC has built up extensive expertise in design technology for embedded computing platforms containing instruction set processors in combination with reconfigurable hardware. The mission of the reconfigurable systems IIAP is to build design technology that enables the programming of heterogeneous reconfigurable platforms with the same ease of use as current technology allows for general-purpose processors. Key activities include the development of an operating system that enables true hardware/software multitasking and the integration of interconnect networks on silicon for task-level reconfiguration in reconfigurable hardware.

Within this program, IMEC and Xilinx’s Research Labs will collaborate in developing a programming environment for reconfigurable systems based on the VIRTEX-II Pro devices as well as future devices. This programming infrastructure will provide support for seamless hardware/software multitasking in future reconfigurable computing platforms. The partial and dynamic reconfiguration capabilities of Xilinx’s FPGAs will be exploited in full to realize these new capabilities.