November 18, 2011 – PRNewswire — SMArt systems Co-design (SMAC) launched today, bringing together a multinational, multidisciplinary partnership of leading companies on a three-year project for design and integration of smart systems. Smart systems incorporate sensing, actuation, computation, wireless communication, and energy harvesting in one package.
The SMAC program aims to put European companies in leadership positions in these key markets by reducing design costs and time-to-market for next-generation smart systems. SMAC partners assert that the design methodology is holding back smart system development. Separate design tools are used currently for different parts of the system, separately modeling, simulating, and designing MEMS sensors, analog and RF components, and digital ICs. No design methodology/tools exist that can simultaneously and seamlessly overcome potential intended or parasitic couplings (e.g. thermal or electromagnetic) of closely packed elements, and other challenges.
We need "a structured design methodology that explicitly accounts for final integration," said Salvatore Rinaudo, SMAC project co-ordinator and Industrial and Multisegment Sector CAD R&D Director at STMicroelectronics. A "holistic, integration-aware, design platform" will allow the industry to exploit the potential of smart systems, while reducing design costs, time-to-market, and integration risks.
Advanced packaging technologies such as system-in-package (SiP) and chip stacking (3D IC) with through-silicon vias (TSV) already allow manufacturers to package heterogeneous parts — digital and analog electronics, RF, MEMS, other sensors, power sources, wireless transmission devices — densely with performance and cost gains.
The SMAC mission covers:
1.New modeling and simulation capabilities to support accurate multi-physics, multi-layer, multi-scale and multi-domain co-simulation.
2.Innovative integration-aware design techniques for components and subsystems from different technology domains and with different functions.
3.Combination and augmentation of existing modeling and simulation tools into a seamless design flow (i.e., the SMAC Platform), enabling integration-aware co-design of smart systems.
4.Demonstration of the effectiveness of some of the new design solutions through implementation of test-cases featuring leading-edge technology.
5.Demonstration of the accuracy and ease of integration of new and existing EDA tools within the SMAC Platform by comparison with state-of-the-art reference methodologies.
6.Demonstration of the usability of the SMAC Platform through its application to an industry-strength design case.
Partners include academia and several Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and semiconductor companies:
STMicroelectronics s.r.l. (Italy), the Project Coordinator;
Philips Medical Systems Nederland BV (The Netherlands);
ON Semiconductor Belgium BVBA (Belgium);
Agilent Technologies Belgium NV (Belgium);
Coventor Sarl (France);
MunEDA GmbH (Germany);
EDALab s.r.l. (Italy);
Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italy);
Tyndall National Institute, University College Cork (Ireland);
Instytut Technologii Elektronowej (Poland);
Politecnico di Torino (Italy);
Universita degli Studi di Catania (Italy);
University of Nottingham (United Kingdom);
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium);
Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (The Netherlands);
Slovak University of Technology Bratislava (Slovakia);
ST-POLITO s.c.a.r.l. (Italy).
SMAC is partially funded by the EU’s FP7 (FP7-ICT-2011-7).
The SMAC project will involve a total effort of over 1,300 person/months and an investment of approximately 13M Euros, of which the industrial partners will contribute around 5M Euros.