Project overview

Relevance of Embedded Systems is rising

Embedded systems are the key innovation driver to improve mechatronic products with cheaper and even new functionalities. They support today’s information society as inter-system communication enabler. Consequently, boundaries of application domains are alleviated and ad-hoc connections and interoperability play an increasing role.


Major Challenges

A major industrial challenge arises from the need to face cost efficient integration of different applications with different levels of safety and security on a single computing platform in an open context. Multi-core and many-core computing platforms have to significantly improve system (and application) integration, efficiency and performance.

Key Objectives

The objective of the EMC² project is to foster these changes through an innovative and sustainable service-oriented architecture approach for mixed criticality applications in dynamic and changeable real-time environments.

EMC² is part of the European Embedded Systems industry strategy to maintain its leading edge position by providing solutions for:

  • Dynamic Adaptability in Open Systems
  • Utilization of expensive system features only as Service-on-Demand in order to reduce the overall system cost
  • Handling of mixed criticality applications under real-time conditions
  • Scalability and utmost flexibility
  • Full scale deployment and management of integrated tool chains, through the entire lifecycle
  • Power supply challenges from dynamic operational changes in MCMC real time systems

EMC² is an attempt to bundle the power for innovation of 98 partners from embedded industry and research from 19 European countries. The EMC² embedded system approach will force the breakthrough and deployment of Multi-Core technology in almost all application domains where real-time and mixed-criticality are issues, and therefore strengthen the competitiveness of the European Embedded System industry. The project is organized in a structure with horizontal and vertical activities closely linked to each other:

  • Horizontal activities: So-called technological work packages (WP1-WP6) will develop dedicated technologies required for the development in implementation of embedded, mixed-criticality multi-core systems.
  • Vertical activities: So-called living labs (WP7-WP12) include several demonstrators for mixed-criticality embedded systems aiming at the same application domain. Each task in a living lab represents a use case. Technologies developed in WP1-WP6 will be applied and evaluated in the dedicated use cases of the living labs.
EMC2 Project overview

EMC² innovation

  • System Architectures will be combined with new explorations of scalability and system compatibility. For a dynamic multi-core multi-criticality software platform a system will be provided where multiple applications can share the same VM, and hardware virtualization will be extended to multicore systems.
  • Executable Application Models and Design Tools for Mixed-Critical, Multi-Core Embedded Systems will be developed by building on the well-established, rigorous system design and automated flows and extending them towards dynamic, heterogeneous, compute-intensive, and mixed-critical systems.
  • Dynamic Runtime Environments and Services: Existing knowledge in mechanisms and architectures for run-time environments will be enhanced to support mixed-critical systems, security techniques, safety and real-time properties.
  • Multi-core Hardware Architectures and Concepts are developed with partial reconfiguration for application specific acceleration opening up a new era of time multiplexed hardware co-processors reducing power and improving efficiency in computational intensive applications. Their functional properties will be delivered as a service through re-configurable multi-core processors.
  • System Design Platform, Tools, Models and Interoperability: Key innovations are generalization of HW/SW co-engineering, operational implementation of several value transversal services bridging the gap between business and engineering by providing a non-monolithic integration framework which generalizes the concept of “Internet of things” for tools and adaptors.
  • System Qualification and Certification: Main innovations are software-based fault-tolerant algorithms and architectures for multi-cores, safety and security assurance methodologies for a holistic approach to system dependability, and scalable verification solutions increasing the level of abstraction for both functional verification and safety qualification.
  • Living Lab Automotive covers applications with related innovations – among others - in highly automated driving, SW defined radio, EV and HEV energy recuperation.
  • In applications for Avionics innovations are complete interoperability, implementation of SOA beyond DDS, new hybrid approaches consisting of statically configured high-criticality computers, and safety-critical execution elements in real-time environment.
  • Third area is Space Application targeting to proof the validity of different Multi-Processor Based system architectures and related development methodologies and tool chains, opening new application domains to the use of multi-cores.
  • In Industrial Manufacturing and Logistics single multi-core designs with potentially variable number of cores can reduce the need for custom PCB layouts.
  • The main technological innovations involved in living lab 5 - Internet of Things - are web real-time communications, ultra low power architecture for sensor networks and synchronized low-latency deterministic networks.
  • Finally, Cross Domain Applications living lab takes results from previous research projects and from the EMC2 technology innovation and uses them in innovative ways to prepare the ground for future multi-core applications.