All the market sectors addressed by reconfigurable computing platforms are represented: IP core providers, Fabless company, tool providers, semiconductor industry and embedded systems applications.

1. TRT

DTO as a strong partner of the Media & Entertainment industries offers complete solutions and services to content creators, network operators, manufacturers and retailers through its Technicolor, Grass Valley, RCA and THOMSON brands.

Thomson is active in more than 30 countries worldwide and employs about 60000 people.

The Deutsche Thomson OHG (DTO), a 100% subsidiary of Thomson under German law, contributing to MORPHEUS as part of Thomson’s global R&D structure has a strong interest in all of the described expected outcomes of the project, especially in the market of professional video/film cameras and equipment.

The Hanover research teams are specialized in algorithms, systems & standards and software/hardware implementations of electronic functions. The site has a wide range of experience in the field of transmission and storage of audiovisual data for consumer as well as professional applications.

INTRACOM is the largest multinational provider of telecommunications products, solutions and professional services, headquartered in Greece. INTRACOM, with a proven 29-year successful track record in Greece and abroad, is a member of both Concern SITRONICS, one of the largest hi-tech companies in Eastern Europe, and INTRACOM HOLDINGS, Greece's largest multinational technology group. INTRACOM TELECOM develops and provides products, solutions and professional services mainly for telecommunications operations and large enterprises. The company's main activities include telecommunication products (Wireline Access, Wireless Access, Wireless Transmission, Full-Service Content Delivery Network, Terminal Devices, Public Phones, Network Management Systems), Network Solutions (Next Generation Networks, Broadband xDSL Provisioning, Wireless Broadband Service Provisioning, Data Transmission, Mobile Networks, Wireless Backhauling, Network Deployment & Integration, Narrowband Services, New Technologies), Operation & Business Support Systems (Network Monitoring Systems, Network & Service Management Fulfilment Systems, Billing & Customer Care Management Systems) and Other Markets (Lottery Systems, Energy Management).
The company is also active in bespoke software applications development and provision of managed and outsorcing services. INTRACOM TELECOM participates in multinational research & development projects in cooperation with other internationally renowned and leading companies, organizations and academic institutions.

Alcatel-Lucent develops solutions that enable service providers, carriers, enterprises and governments worldwide to deliver voice, data and video communication services to end-users. The international telecommunications equipment vendor is guided by the vision of enriching peoples’ lives by actively shaping the world’s communication.

Alcatel-Lucent Deutschland AG is the German subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent S.A., Paris. On 1 January 2007, Alcatel SEL AG in Stuttgart acquired the shares of Lucent Technologies Network Systems GmbH in Nuremberg. Alcatel SEL AG was renamed to Alcatel-Lucent Deutschland AG that same month. Before, Alcatel-Lucent arose from the merger of Alcatel and Lucent Technologies on 1 December 2006. Its headquarters are in Stuttgart. With around 5,000 employees in Germany, the company achieved pro forma revenues of €1.4 billion in 2006, putting it in fourth place within the group after the USA, China and France. All five Alcatel-Lucent business groups are represented in Germany: Wireless, Wireline, Convergence, Services and Enterprise. Within the group, Germany is the competence centre for optical networks, including cross-connects, 40G and WDM technology.

The team involved in MORPHEUS belongs to a unit in Nuremberg, responsible for specification, design and verification of ASICs, FPGAs and embedded systems built with such devices, including predevelopment and evaluation of tool-support. Results are a high number of standards, methods and own developments, like VHDL-Coding standard, ADeVA – formal specification-method, VHDL development system, PROVerify protocol verification. These solutions are used in internal processes but also, as for example the development system VHDL “DevSys“, by third parties and within education organizations.

TOSA (900p) develops, produces and sales a comprehensive set of optronics products ranging from cameras to airborne, land and naval systems. Typical products include IR cameras for civil and defence applications, endoscopic cameras for medical applications, enhanced vision systems for civil aircraft's (landing phase), airborne, land and naval surveillance systems, airborne, land and naval defence systems,...

The MORPHEUS project will be conducted within the Technical Business Unit of TOSA: 300p covering a large range of skills among which 50p in hardware design, 50p in software design, 20p in image processing algorithm design and 20p in servomechanism design. The work will be achieved by engineers from the hardware design department and from the image processing algorithm design department. It will be managed directly by the image processing chief architect of the Business Unit.

STMicroelectronics is a global independent semiconductor company and is a leader in developing and delivering semiconductor solutions across the spectrum of microelectronics applications. An unrivalled combination of silicon and system expertise, manufacturing strength, Intellectual Property (IP) portfolio and strategic partners positions the Company at the forefront of System-on-Chip (SOC) technology and its products play a key role in enabling today's convergence trends.

The group totals more than 45,000 employees, 16 advanced research and development units, 39 design and application centres, 17 main manufacturing sites and 88 sales offices in 31 countries.

AST (Advanced System Technology) is a central function of ST R&D with the mission of providing the Company with early access to leading edge critical system technology and to innovative market opportunities.

Central CAD & Design Solutions is a central function of ST R&D with the mission of providing state of the art design solutions and design platforms in advanced silicon technologies.

PACT XPP Technologies AG (PACT), headquartered in Munich, Germany, is a privately financed fabless semiconductor and intellectual property vendor that develops and markets extreme performance processor solutions. The company's patented architecture delivers extreme bandwidth and processing performance. Due to the flexibility of the XPP architecture a significant portion from a wide range of computing-intensive applications, communications, high quality imaging, pattern recognition, multimedia and wireless baseband processing can be implemented.

PACT introduced its eXtreme Processing Platform (XPP™) technology in October 2000 and simultaneously demonstrated functional engineering samples of its initial reference implementation, the XPU128. The company offers IP as well as complete development systems for reconfigurable environments and provides software simulation and development tools for technology evaluation of embedded intellectual property cores for SOCs and application specific processors (ASSP's).

PACT supports system integration of multimedia and wireless applications through the PSDS (PACT System Development Platform) with the 0.13µ CMOS XPP64-A reconfigurable processor. An upgraded version with video specific enhancements of XPP is planned to be available in 2006.

PACT can directly use results from the 4S project, where the XPP array is enhanced towards low-power, smaller area and support for video applications. PACT is managing this project and expects synergies in several fields.

M2000 was founded in 1996 by three EDA veterans. Since 2000, the company has concentrated on the development of embedded FPGA macros.

M2000's current vision is to “design and develop state of the art configurable logic technology for the rapidly growing reprogrammable SOC market.” The founders have worked together for more than 17 years and hold numerous patents in the field of reprogrammable logic and its applications to electronic design emulation. The company has 16 employees with headquarters in France, offices in California and agents in Europe, Israel and Japan.

A hardware and software reconfigurable platform chip solution represents a strategic evolution of the current Embedded FPGA macro M2000 is proposing to the market for adding flexibility to a SOC design. Improving Costs and Performance is a key success factor in the embedded FPGA market and the implementation of the MORPHEUS solution, together with the other team members within this projects, will be a key driver towards technological improvements of the current architecture and usability flow.

ACE Associated Compiler Experts bv is a majority owned subsidiary of ACE Associated Computer Experts bv. ACE has worked in the field of system design and embedded systems for nearly 30 years.  In the eighties ACE introduced UNIX to the European market.  In the nineties ACE focused on a revolutionary approach in compiler development, leading to the CoSy compiler development system of today. CoSy is used world-wide in the embedded processing market and is used by companies such as ST Microelectronics, Creative, Ericsson and NEC, who are in the fore-front of designing processors and related technology for embedded systems. ACE has a strong background of cooperation with universities and other research groups and, closely related to this, incorporating results from research in its products.  ACE was the project leader in the ESPRIT projects Compare and Prepare, which culminated in the development of the CoSy product. ACE's strongest market is that of embedded processing and DSPs (Digital Signal Processors) in particular. About half of the customers using CoSy develop DSP compilers. ACE has developed the DSP-C extension to C specifically for this market. The DSP-C design was proposed to the ISO C committee for standardization. This has led to the definition of `Embedded C', which has recently been ratified. It is an example of ACE's dedication to providing the right solutions to its customers.

CriticalBlue is Electronic Design Automation (EDA) start-up company based in the UK, formed in 2002. The company currently has 11 employees, primarily engineering, including application engineering support in the US. It is focused on delivering tools for accelerating software in embedded microprocessor applications to key design houses and semiconductor vendors in the telecommunication, automotive and multimedia sectors. The company has developed tool suite, called Cascade, which is capable of reading in executable code targeted existing embedded CPU and automatically architecting a custom coprocessor to accelerate tasks that would otherwise be performed on a general purpose processor. The tool automatically identifies parallelism opportunities from analysis of binary code and architects a custom coprocessor microarchitecture. Advanced synthesis and code compilation techniques are employed to generate an efficient microarchitecture with a minimum of user interaction. The coprocessor is an ASIP (Application Specific Instruction Processor) that integrates a mix of execution and connectivity resources that are optimised for a software application. The tool directly outputs the RTL description of the coprocessor hardware so that it may be implemented using a standard design flow by an end customer. The coprocessor is programmed using microcode and thus the coprocessor may be reconfigured by use of microcode only changes after hardware fabrication. The hardware contains interfaces to industry standard busses and the tool suite automatically updates the main processor code to transfer data to and from the coprocessor as required to perform the acceleration. By exploiting the parallelism available in existing software applications the approach can provide significant accelerations in comparison with execution on a general purpose microprocessor.

The Institute for Information Processing Technology (Institut für Technik der Informationsverarbeitung - UK) is one out of thirteen laboratories of the Department of Electrical Engineering & Information Technology of the Universitaet Karlsruhe (TH), the oldest German technical university. The institute is under the corporate management of Prof. Klaus D. Müller-Glaser und Prof. Jürgen Becker and concentrates on VLSI integration and computer aided methods for the design of (embedded) electronic systems and Microsystems. The research activity is documented by more than 30 filed patents and 130 publications (1999-2002). The research and development activities of the UK are for many years now in close cooperation with numerous industry partners in the areas of mobile communication, telecommunication networks, VLSI and processor technology, EDA, automotive, optical/electronic sensors and medicine microsystems. The UK experiences and activities relevant for this project are in the areas of System-on-Chip (SOC) integration for multimedia and mobile communication Systems, digital baseband algorithms and hardware/software architectures, fine/coarse grain dynamically reconfigurable architectures and low power VLSI design. The UK is currently involved here in several industrial and academic R&D activities, e.g. IP-based EDA and microelectronic integration of baseband algorithms for multistandard SOC solutions in future wireless systems, development of new dynamically reconfigurable architectures and circuits, as well as VLSI integration of adaptive SOC solutions.

The Delft University of Technology Computer Engineering Laboratory performs research and teaches the engineering discipline of how to determine, develop, and integrate software and hardware to build a computing system.  The laboratory focuses on the definition of system requirements, from embedded to general purpose, their architecture and implementations, and the study and development of tools and software that allow to improve the analysis and synthesis of computing systems. More precisely, the laboratory is actively involved in: computer architecture, machine organizations, and network processing, mapping of application and algorithm requirements to architectures of embedded systems (e.g. multimedia), compiler technology capable of directing system requirements to architectural definitions and improve implementations, architectural synthesis tools for semi-automatic implementation of architectures, computer arithmetic and logic design, algorithms and tools for testing memories, built in self-test of logic circuits, and automatic test pattern generation for combinational and sequential logic circuits, performance modelling and optimisation techniques and tools.

Most of the funded research comes from the STW (Dutch national science foundation) and the industry: Philips, IBM, Intel, Nokia, etc. 12 start-up companies have been founded by ex-students and computer engineering faculty members. The laboratory formation includes 8 faculty members, 3 staff members, 27 PhD students, and 22 MSc. students.

CEA-LIST is a research department inside CEA, which is a French R&D governmental agency whose field of expertise is directed towards software intensive systems. Based in Ile-de-France (in the neighbourhood of Paris), LIST combines basic research and industrial R&D within a dynamic structure, and is mainly financed by industrial contracts. The project-based culture of its 300 scientists, engineers and technicians makes it a natural partner for industry seeking breakthrough technology, from the initial concept down to working demonstrators. CEA-LIST is primarily concerned with the development of technology that combines software and hardware to form highly integrated complex systems. The research activities are structured around three major themes, the embedded systems, the interactive systems and the sensors and signal processing. In embedded systems, the Image and Embedded Computer Lab (30 people), involved in the MORPHEUS project is specialised in the design of computers for embedded applications with a specific focus on dynamic reconfiguration. It has already participated in several European projects (MEDEA+: CryptoSOC, PICS).

UBO (Université de Bretagne Occidentale) is a medium size university with 16000 students, mainly located in Brest, France. The LESTER is a 50 persons mixed electronics/computer science laboratory specialized in tools and methods for integrated applications. The ’Architectures and systems’ (AS) group has joined the LESTER in 2004 bringing a 15 years background in reconfigurable architecture and tools. LESTER received an agreement from the French CNRS in 2002, as a young laboratory, very active with several national network projects (RNTL, RNRT, ACI). An objective of the lab is to help the creation of the regional institute ’IRCASE’ with the ambition to contribute to the European research in the field of embedded system design, with at a starting point 120 permanent researchers and PhD. The AS group has one of the earliest stories in the field of reconfigurable computing. Firstly, there was ArMen project (1990) that demonstrated tight coupling between a processor and an FPGA, and built a programmable/reconfigurable parallel architectures and software from this assembly. After ArMen, the activity was turned to architecture independent CAD tools for FPGAs. These tools come to maturity in year 2000 in the form of a two layer software for physical synthesis, and logic synthesis from object-oriented languages (Madeo Project). Since 2003, the group is actively working on compiler interfaces and libraries in the French RNTL project OSGAR. Works have started to extend the framework to coarse grain architecture with a practical experience on an STMicroelectronics reconfigurable unit.

The Advanced Research Centre on Electronic Systems for Information and Communication Engineering (ARCES) was founded at the University of Bologna (One of the largest Universities of Italy, with more than 100,000 students and more than 2000 permanent staff people) on 2001, following the approval and the funding by the Ministry of Research, of a project to set up is an excellence centre in the area of information technology. Its main goals are: 1) to develop innovative electronic systems, ranging from integrated sensors to micromechanical devices, from analogue and digital signal processing architectures to multimedia communication equipments; 2) to conduct research activities in the field of wireless communications; 3) to devise new solutions for their applications in the field of image processing, machine vision, pattern recognition and pervasive computing; 4) to carry out the technology transfer of the more relevant research results to the National and European Industry.

Founded in 1987, ARTTIC is the leading European group providing consultancy and management services to international technology-related partnerships. ARTTIC is highly specialised and provides exclusively services related to the set-up and management of international R&D collaborations.

Over the last 18 years ARTTIC has successfully supported more than 100 projects with operational project management and gained an unequalled experience and skills in the management of European RTD collaborations. Its total staff of 35 people is fully dedicated to the support of international project management. ARTTIC provides the suitable methods and tools to ensure an efficient coordination and remote collaboration of large consortia composed of project teams spread over Europe.

ARTTIC’s experience includes management support for large collaborative projects in various domains, including information and communication technologies and their applications, Life Sciences/biotechnologies, transport, nanotechnologies, etc.

In FP6, ARTTIC has until now been involved in the preparation and management of 14 Integrated Projects and Networks of Excellence in nearly all thematic priorities (domains 1 to 6). In the IST programme, ARTTIC is currently involved in the management of two Integrated Projects.

17. TUBS
The Technische Universität Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig is Germany’s oldest technical university with more than 14000 students from all around the world. The Institut für Datentechnik und Kommunikationsnetze (Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering), has been involved in both embedded system design and embedded system design automation for more than 15 years. During this time, real-time systems have been developed for many applications in space, automotive and multimedia technology. There is a long lasting collaboration with Grass Valley Germany GmbH a subsidiary of Thomson in world leading reconfigurable systems for video applications bringing together HD and electronic film applications, real-time systems and fundamental work in embedded system architectures and programming. The latest architecture of a complex real-time noise reducer outperforms the latest Pentium processors by more than a factor of 4.000 while it remains still easily programmable.
The institute is headed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rolf Ernst who is well known as a top expert in embedded system design and design automation. He is and was executive organizer of leading conferences in the field, such as the DATE General Chair (99, Munich), DATE Sponsor Committee Chair (2005), or the General and Program Chair of ICCAD 2000 and 2001 (San Jose), and was executive board member and Topic Chair of numerous other major conferences. He is Chair of the European Design Automation Association (EDAA) and is a member of the board of directors of the ACM Special Interest Group on Embedded System Design (SIGBED). He gave numerous invited talks, embedded tutorials and tutorials on major international events and contributed to seminars and summer schools in the areas of hardware/software co-design, embedded system architectures, and system modeling and verification. He published over 130 papers and received an ICCD 91 best paper award. Rolf Ernst is an IEEE Fellow and served as an ACM-SIGDA Distinguished Lecturer.

18. TUC

The Department of Circuit and System Design (SSE) of Chemnitz University of Technology has a comprehensive expertise and extensive knowledge in the design of heterogeneous micro systems, application specific integrated circuits (ASIC) and in the development of supporting EDA tools. Special know-how and experience exist in the field of PLD and FPGA (field programmable gate arrays) design and application. In recent research projects, most of which were industry-driven, an FPGA-based rapid prototyping system for real-time image processing hardware and a fuzzy pattern classifier ASIC for the analysis of mechanical vibrations of rotating machine parts were developed. Other research areas include:

• System design of heterogeneous micro systems
• Design and qualification of re-usable components and IP (Intellectual Properties), development of design environments for re-usable components and applications
• Methods for unambiguous specification capturing of heterogeneous / mixed signal systems
• Hardware accelerators for image processors and fuzzy pattern classifiers
• Low Power Design (system bus encoding techniques for reduced power dissipation)
• Extension of SystemC for the design of protocol-centric digital systems and System-on-Chip (SoC)

In the last 3 years, SSE has published about 50 papers and journal articles related to the research topics listed above. Many of these papers and articles have been presented at internationally recognized conferences such as DAC, DATE and PATMOS or have been accepted for publication in IEEE journals.