European Research Project Aims for Greener Electronics

The partners in a new publicly-funded research project today have announced details of the multinational/multidisciplinary program “END — Models, Solutions, Methods and Tools for Energy-Aware Design.” This three-year ENIAC (European Nanoelectronics Initiative Advisory Council) project is designed to enhance the competitiveness of Europe’s semiconductor and electronics equipment companies in developing new products and technologies that are at the forefront of energy efficiency.

Energy efficiency is one of the most critical aspects of today’s information society. Reducing energy consumption of electronic devices, circuits and systems, coupled with improving energy generation, conversion, storage and management capabilities represent the biggest challenges that engineers and scientists operating in the electronics sector face in the next decade.

The END project will pursue the energy efficiency objective through an innovative holistic approach that unifies, under a common design platform, the development of modeling, simulation, design and EDA techniques for a wide range of devices and systems (digital blocks, analog/RF blocks, discrete components). The project will also address the conception and experimentation of new power supply systems, with particular emphasis on energy management aspects. This mission enables a synergic approach to energy-aware design, offering a comprehensive set of solutions covering the many different facets of the complex problem of accounting for energy effects during the design of heterogeneous circuits and systems, such as those that will be hosted by the electronic products of the future.

“The ultimate objective of the END project is to bring innovative energy-aware design solutions and EDA technologies into the product development of the industrial partners of the Consortium,” said Salvatore Rinaudo, END project coordinator and Industrial and Multisegment Sector CAD R&D Director at STMicroelectronics. “We will enable the design and manufacture of electronic circuits that will be at the basis of the green information society of the future.”

END brings together the expertise of user companies (IDMs, fabless), design centers, universities and institutes in a range of projects that will establish standards and contribute to building a solid energy-aware electronics design base for Europe. In particular, the project goals include the development of power models for non-bulk CMOS devices, a unified low-power design methodology for heterogeneous systems and SoC (System-on-Chip) devices, energy-efficient building blocks for heterogeneous systems, energy-efficient IP components for SoCs, energy management of systems based on multiple, heterogeneous supplies, and demonstrators of solar energy and wireless sensor systems.

The project will cost approximately Euro12.6 million, with funding provided by both the ENIAC JU (Joint Undertaking) and from the public authorities of Belgium, Greece, Italy and Slovakia. The ENIAC JU is a public-private partnership with the European Commission, Member States, Associated States and European R&D actors and levers private and national investments.

The project partners are:
STMicroelectronics s.r.l., Italy (Project Coordinator)
Centro Ricerche FIAT, Italy
ETH Lab, Eurotech Group, Italy
Numonyx Italy, Italy
Consorzio Nazionale Interuniversitario per la Nanoelettronica, Italy
Politecnico di Torino, Italy
Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, Italy
Università degli Studi di Catania, Italy
Università degli Studi di Salerno, Italy
NXP Semiconductors, Germany
Intracom S.A. Telecom Solutions, Greece
inAccess Networks, Greece
University of Patras, Greece
ON Semiconductor, Belgium
ON Semiconductor, Slovakia
Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia
LEITAT Technological Center, Spain
Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique, Switzerland