4S project

The Smart Chips for Smart Surroundings (4S) project was a European Union 6th Framework research project completed in December 2007. The aim of the 4S project was to create flexible and reconfigurable building blocks paving the way for new consumer devices and applications such as digital information broadcasting, ambient intelligence devices, and 3G/4G multimedia terminals.

A consortium of European companies and research institutions participated in this project; Recore’s Montium^® technology was chosen for the hardware concept platform development, due to its energy and cost efficiency.

The project provided proof of concept of power-efficient reconfigurable computing, and delivered 2 concept chips: a digital baseband chip and an analogue frontend chip.

Key innovation in the digital baseband chip was the so-called “reconfigurable fabric” IP, consisting of 4 Montium tile processors connected by a network-on-chip, and attached to the rest of the system as an AHB slave. This reconfigurable fabric proved to be an extremely powerful and efficient structure to run computational-intensive DSP algorithms like FFTs, filters or codecs. The Montium tile processors were individually reconfigurable during runtime, allowing the mapping of different tasks depending on the current use-case. Various digital radio standards like DRM or DAB can in this way be processed by the same hardware.

The 4S project proved the advantages of reconfigurable computing as:

• highly energy efficient
• flexible and programmable
• runtime adaptable
• high performance

For example, the Montium-based, reconfigurable system-on-chip, including memory access, reduced energy use when running non-power-of-two FFTs by a factor of 33 compared to the General Purpose Processor. In a comparison of processing time, relative speed increased by a factor of 40.