Research Areas

Embedded virtualization – With the availability of high-performance multi-core CPUs, embedded systems manufacturers are looking for new ways to exploit the increased compute power. Virtualization allows manufacturers to not only consolidate multiple embedded systems onto a single system-on-chip (SoC), it also allows them to streamline their systems engineering processes and to engage in new business models. By using embedded virtualization solutions that fulfill embedded requirements (such as deterministic real-time behavior, prioritized fast boot of timing-critical partitions, minimal CPU and memory footprint, etc.), embedded systems builders can design new systems that go beyond the capabilities of existing embedded solutions.

Application Domains

Manufacturing – With virtualization, programmable controllers can run on virtualized and shared hardware. This leverages multicore hardware and enables the same functionality on a smaller number of boxes.

Automotive – Different applications can run in parallel while being strongly isolated against each other. Safety critical and normal application can be hosted on the same hardware independently. Update cycles can be decoupled and customer applications can be deployed without impacting critical automotive systems.

Health care – The separation of critical functions to control the medical device (e.g. CT scan) and the visualization application is the most important aspect of virtualization in the healthcare domain. This enables application developer to use real-time environments to control the device and common application platforms (e.g. Microsoft Windows) for the visualization, configuration and use of the medical device.