European project to improve the functionality and reduce the energy consumption of embedded devices

The vIrtical (Sw/Hw Extensions for Virtualized Heterogeneous) started on July 2011, funded by the European Union's Seventh Framework Program. Eight partners are involved in this project, led by the Parallel Architecture's Group (GAP) at the Universitat Politècnica de Valencia (Spain).

During the last decade embedded devices have invaded our everyday life thanks to the recent advances in wireless networks and the exponential growth in the usage of multimedia applications. Embedded systems are currently present at home (set-top boxes, smartphones, TV set), at work (smartphones, tablets), even when we travel (in-car and in-flight entertainment). These devices provide a wide variety of hardware resources that support adaptivity to a wide variety of applications functionalities and a protected execution environment. Within this context, the designer must not only cope with an exponentially increasing complexity, but also invoke innovative power-aware methodology to reduce the power consumption.

The vIrtical project aims to increase functionality, reliability and security of embedded devices at sustainable cost and power consumption. This is achieved in the vIritical project by extending the virtualization concept of the general-purpose domain to the embedded domain.

Although virtualization is an advanced technology widely used for providing an effective and clean way of isolating applications from hardware in the general-purpose computing domain in order to provide flexibility and security, its application on embedded systems is still in its infancy. The challenge is the virtualization of embedded systems that requires particular approaches meeting tight resource budget and considering their particularities.

In order to expand the virtualization concept to the embedded devices, this project will deliver software/hardware extensions at different layers of the design stack (hardware, operating system, hypervisor and applications) to increase flexibility, programmability, performance, QoS, reliability, security and power saving. This unique integrated approach will allow heterogeneous embedded systems to achieve the aforementioned requirements while meeting the power and cost constraints of embedded systems.

The vIrtical consortium consists of five companies and three Universities from five countries (Spain, Italy, France, Greece and Germany) collaborating in the extension at different levels of the stack design. The presence of major European industrial players of the embedded domain in the consortium will enable rapid commercialisation of the project outputs, enhancing European competitiveness in the embedded market.

About 2.8 million Euros of the budget is provided by European tax payer through the offices of the European Commission, the rest being funded by project partners including the Universitat Politècnica de València, Università di Bologna, STMicroelectronics, Thales, Technological Educational Institute of Crete, SYSGO, ARM, and VOSYS.

Datos de contacto:
Luis Zurano Conches
Unidad de Comunicación Científica-CTT
Universitat Politècnica de València
ciencia@upv.es
647422347