Samsung, IMEC Partner on Mobile Terminal Development
Online staff -- EDN, January 26, 2005
Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has become the first long-term strategic partner within European nanotechnology research institute IMEC’s Multi-Mode Multi-Media (M4) research program, focused on developing key technologies for next-generation portable communication products including mobile terminals.
Ubiquitous network functionality will be incorporated into future mobile terminals to deal with the multitude of communication modes along with various multimedia applications. Further in the future, these terminals are expected to require adaptive behavior technology to intelligently manage the computational resources that will be distributed and shared across the environing systems.
The M4 integrated research platform aims to resolve the fundamental technological issues for future mobile terminals, allowing the true ubiquitous network environment to become a reality, IMEC said.
To overcome the barriers of complexity, cost, power consumption, high throughput at low latency, and flexibility in developing a mobile terminal, IMEC and Samsung have outlined a number of domains of innovation, targeted by the M4 technology programs.
M4 strategic program partners join a frame of technology programs and closely collaborate with IMEC’s cross-disciplinary team of more than 100 researchers. The M4 roadmap is fine-tuned with the strategic partners, ensuring that research targets are strongly tuned to industrial applications, which is a major advantage for the strategic partners.
IMEC believes the integrated approach guarantees the compatibility of the different technology solutions, and enables efficient transfer of the research results into industrial applications.
In addition to its partnership with Samsung, IMEC has running relationships with Freescale, Infineon and Xilinx, collaborating within one of the M4 technology programs.
“We are very pleased that our successful relationship with Samsung, which started in 2003 with Samsung joining our core sub-45nm CMOS research platform, has now resulted in this M4 strategic partnership,” said Gilbert Declerck, president and CEO of IMEC, in a statement. “Such long-term collaborations with industry leaders prove the industrial relevance of our research programs."
