Europe's “EMC²” initiative is intended to increase the performance and efficiency of embedded systems for the automotive and manufacturing industries, the Internet of Things, healthcare and aerospace. With a budget of around 90 million Euros, EMC² is one of the most important subsidized European projects and includes 99 partners from 19 countries. The three-year EMC²project is being funded by Artemis Joint Undertaking, now part of the ECSEL Joint Undertaking, and 19 national funding organizations. Infineon Technologies is the project coordinator. The EMC² project is intended to simplify and strengthen the use of embedded systems. It is set to end in March 2017. EMC²is part of the ”European Embedded Systems” industrial program, which is designed to help Europe maintain its leadership position in embedded systems.
The term “embedded systems” refers to systems that are incorporated into larger systems. Examples include the motion control in a robot arm that is integrated – that is to say ”embedded” – into a production line, or engine control units of a car. In addition to manufacturing equipment and vehicles, embedded systems can be found virtually everywhere; in households (such as washers or dryers), airplanes, trains and large-scale medical equipment. A medium-sized car, for example, currently contains about 80 embedded systems, all of which must work reliably over the vehicle's entire lifetime; in an airplane more than 100 even higher integrated systems are embedded, and in manufacturing facilities the number of embedded systems may range into the thousands.
Relevance of EMC²research project and its goals
Embedded systems are controlled, regulated and monitored by powerful microcontrollers with multiple processing units, the so-called cores. Infineon's microcontroller family AURIX™, for example, currently has up to five cores.
Embedded systems are becoming increasingly complex. Being the intelligence of so-called Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) they enhance or even replace simple electro-mechanical devices. In addition, the future will see more and more networks of embedded systems. As a consequence, microcontrollers in these embedded systems will be responsible for many more tasks, and will have to be much faster and even more reliable than today. Their real-time capability will thus have to improve drastically.
This is where EMC² comes in. The project partners want to lay the foundations for a new microcontroller architecture which is so flexible and reliable that it can be used in all application areas relevant for the European industries; mainly automotive, industrial manufacturing and logistics, Internet of Things, healthcare and aerospace. The aim of EMC²is to reduce the cost of system design as well as the needed development time by 15 percent each. Another goal is to reduce the time and effort for system validation to an even greater degree.
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