UMIC
Cluster - Overview
The goal of this cluster is the interdisciplinary design of Ultra high-speed Mobile Information and Communication systems (UMIC) providing an order of magnitude improvement of the perceived quality of service. Concepts and demonstrators for smart, mobile, broadband, low-cost systems will be developed which support the demanding applications of the next-decade mobile Internet.
The research program is structured into four research areas: The Mobile Applications and Services area has its focus on demanding key application classes and their interplay with the wireless transport. Representative applications of Mobile Multimedia Processing and Peer-to-peer Mobile Information Processing will be developed. The core area Wireless Transport Platform comprises the mobile devices and the wireless network architectures. The Cognitive Radio paradigm will be pursued consistently. Adaptive re-configurability at the air interface, including multi-hop capabilities, will be provided, balancing between conflicting requirements concerning bit-rates, radio coverage, processing power, and power consumption. The goal is to achieve never seen spectrum efficiency, coexistence abilities, robustness and reliability, throughput capacities, and delay performance. In the research area RF Subsystem and SoC Design advanced integrated analog and digital circuits will be developed under the conflicting regimes of flexibility and energy efficiency, taking into account constraints of future technology such as current leakage and soft errors. The extreme complexity can only be handled by integrating large numbers of processors on a single chip. The UMIC approach will require new formal methods and software tools for design, optimization, verification, and operation of components and systems which will be supported by the research area Cross Disciplinary Methods and Tools.
A test bed for proof of concepts and verification of solutions will be set up. The UMIC challenges with respect to performance will not be solvable on a single layer. The required tremendous leap in innovation can only be achieved by the truly cross-disciplinary approach, which brings together the necessary disciplines ranging from computer science via information theory and communications engineering to complex system-on-chip design.