August 9, 2010
The ACROSS (Artemis CROSS Domain architecture) project, selected under the 2nd ARTEMIS Joint Undertaking Call, was kicked off in Vienna, Austria. ACROSS is combining the research efforts of 19 companies, including TTTech, research organizations and universities from Austria, France, Germany and Italy. The project aims at providing an industrialization approach for common architectural solutions based on the EC Framework Program Seven (FP7) funded project GENESYS results, including a FPGA-based "multi-processor system on a chip" implementation of a "network on a chip", tailored middleware components and flexible, embedded tools. The results will be demonstrated in three industrial domains, namely the automotive, aerospace and the industrial domains.
ACROSS aims at offering to industrial domain designers a common, cross domain architectural solution for embedded systems. ACROSS will develop building block components of the GENESYS core services, using VHDL format. The "network on a chip" design will be based on a trusted network authority backbone providing strict space and time partitioning. The project further foresees to integrate different application CPUs as well as a number of communication interfacing cores to allow flexible connection to various systems and for different applications. In addition, the middleware components to be developed will contain selected optional services, as defined in the GENESYS architectural approach. Finally, the industrial domain work packages will provide middleware component based "domain specific services" that can be used in the individual domains according to their specific demands.
The competitive advantage of such approach to be developed in the course of ACROSS is expected in the cross domain re-use of standard components which are independent from the different industrial domains. Designers in the various industrial domains can add domain specific services to tailor the approach according to their specific requirements. This cross domain, overall approach is expected to save development time and cost and shall rise the reliability level at architecture level compared to domain specific approaches used today. It will further leverage the design results derived in different industrial domains, avoiding to "re-invent the wheel" over and over again in different industrial domains.
