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Economic Development,
Scientific and Technological Prospects
The project intends to develop novel algorithms and
methodologies for the design and implementation of
embedded controllers for safety-critical systems. A
significant part of the project is concerned with
fundamental research that has a long-time strategic
horizon. However, since one of the deliverables is a
design flow, we believe the impact on the industrial
and academic community can be large. We expect that
the EDA companies may adopt the flow as a standard
at least in some application areas such as
automotive design. Cadence Design Systems has
initiated a focused effort in this market and it is
likely that some of the ideas presented here may
form a significant part of the methodology supported
by the Cadence Design Systems tools. This is an
interesting model of proliferation of academic
research, as witnessed by the experience we had in
the past. We will take as reference the area of EDA
(electronic design automation) tools where the
Berkeley team and the L’Aquila team have experience.
In this area, revolutionary ideas developed in
academia made it into the industrial world in a
period of about ten years. In this case, it was
essential for the developers of the ideas to
participate directly in the development of the
industrial messaging, of the technical directions,
of the assembly of strong teams and the formation of
start-ups that became large companies with leading
market position (the two companies, Cadence and
Synopsys, now hold the number 1 and 2 spots in the
EDA world in terms of revenues, market
capitalization and earnings). It is instructive to
point out that the first application of the basic
ideas came in large companies such as Intel, DEC, TI
and ST where the industrial teams used the prototype
university work having free access to the source
code. In fact, the 486 and 586 design at Intel was
done using extensively the tools developed at the
University of California, Berkeley. This positive
experience reported widely in the literature by
these “illuminated” companies provided the push for
the adoption of tools and methodologies by all other
IC companies, thus giving impetus for the formation
of the start-ups.
The
essential lesson learnt throughout this experience
is that, to really have an impact the economic
development of industry we need:
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A “revolutionary”
research with large potential advantages
over existing techniques. |
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A group of
forward-looking companies with strong
competitive pressures that create the need
of innovation on a large-scale basis. |
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The willingness and
enthusiasm of researchers to engage in
industrial applications and to deliver the
missionary vision of the future. |
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The creation of an
appropriate support group either inside the
major companies affected by the change or by
start-ups whose mission is to proliferate
the technology to the industrial ``masses''
on a worldwide basis. |
We believe that the lack of one of these ingredients
may create serious obstacles to the successful
proliferation of innovation. We have seen an
essential difference here between US and Europe and
we believe that there is a large potential of
innovation in the way research and industry
interact. The composition of the partners makes it
possible to exchange ideas on how to disseminate
results in industry and to leverage the US
experience in this topic.
In short, we are planning to place quite some effort
to extend our theory to applications armed with
experience contributed by some of the partners who
had previous experience in this domain and with the
previous results obtained over the years. In
addition, we have explicitly allocated time and
effort in a separate work package to disseminate
results in industry and academia as well and to
interact with other projects with significant
overlapping with ours. |
