Safer travels and implants with DeSyRe systems The DeSyRe project developed a novel DeSyRe SoC architecture and underlying concepts for reliability. Such SoCs have been shown to typically use 28 percent less energy and 48 percent less chip area while offering nine times lower hardware failure rate if designed with this novel architecture. DeSyRe’s industry partners are using the new concepts to help create safer cars and trains, more reliable medical devices, more advanced brain models, and even easier-to-program embedded many-core systems. The use of electronic embedded systems is more and more pervasive in many domains, from industrial to automotive and biomedical. Some of these applications are safety-critical. The DeSyRe project (www.desyre.eu) brought together leading European experts in the field of fault-tolerant and self-repairing design. Now that the project ends, DeSyRe’s industry partners YOGITECH, Recore Systems and Neurasmus are implementing the new techniques in products for the space, automotive, and medical industry to reap the benefits of the research. Industry partner YOGITECH (www.yogitech.com) helps silicon vendors and system integrators to meet functional-safety challenges. Their main customers are from the automotive market, while companies in industrial automation, biomedical and railway markets are catching up to the importance of safety. YOGITECH participated in the DeSyRe project to offer their customers fault tolerance and continuous availability on top of safety. During the DeSyRe project, YOGITECH built on their proprietary fault Robust Methodology and tightly combined fault detection, fault diagnosis, and reconfiguration to implement safe and dependable architectures for reconfigurable embedded systems. An ARM-based demonstrator shows the benefits of newly developed hardware and software IPs. 'The results of the DeSyRe project contributed in winning new businesses and reinforced our leadership in the functional-safety market,' said Silvano Motto, CEO of YOGITECH. Industry partner Recore Systems (www.recoresystems.com) works on making many-core programming easy. They transferred DeSyRe’s fault-detection and reconfiguration techniques to two different application fields. The first application is missions into deep space where radiation levels are high, and reliable and fault-tolerant systems are a must. 'For years, we’ve been working on detecting faults and continuing proper operation in case part of a chip breaks down' says Gerard Rauwerda, CTO at Recore Systems. 'With the DeSyRe technologies, we offer our space customers even more reliability in on-chip networks and DSP cores.' The second application is in Recore Systems’ FlexaWare many-core embedded platform (www.flexaware.net). DeSyRe explored concepts of task-based programming and runtime task migration for fault tolerance, which find an immediate application in the development of an intelligent many-core operating system and runtime for the FlexaWare platform – crucial for easy programming of many-cores. Neurasmus (neurasmus.com) is a research and development company which valorizes existing intellectual property from the Erasmus Medical Center and develops new high-tech medical systems which can be used as research tools or for the treatment of neuroscience-related diseases. For Neurasmus, the DeSyRe project has resulted in research breakthroughs in the field of computational neuroscience, computer engineering and beyond. 'DeSyRe opened a window to a whole new world for us.' says Chris de Zeeuw, CEO at Neurasmus. Work in DeSyRe has stimulated the launch of two novel Neurasmus products: the Implant Toolbox and BrainFrame. The Implant Toolbox is a collection of fault-tolerance and security techniques finely tuned for implantable medical devices (IMD’s). Brainframe is a domain-specific platform delivering high-performance, scalable and intuitive-to-program features for labs and companies active in the field of brain-modeling research and applications. BrainFrame is in the early steps of commercialization. Both ideas are highly innovative and, while targeting niche markets, face no serious competition. In all, DeSyRe has brought together a variety of experts in fault tolerance which worked together for three years to create a new architecture and develop many underlying concepts. Each partner now continues to build on the project’s concepts to deliver more robust and safer products for their customers. This way, one research project benefits many! Countries Italy, Netherlands, Sweden
