| Abstract |
Electromagnetic software plays a key role in the design and manufacturing of innovative electronic sub-systems: wireless components, micro sensors, smart antennas, high-frequency active and passive devices, MEMS, etc. These new emerging devices have a major impact on a large number of strategic applications, such as mobile communication, broadband networks, security systems, earth remote sensing, transport monitoring, de-mining, tele-medicine etc. by determining their technical feasibility. During the last years, the SMEs involved in this proposal developed and maintained state-of-the-art electromagnetic software offering services to Industries worldwide and achieved a solid international market success thanks to the result accuracy and the reliability of their software tools. New products coming from USA and Far-East are now reducing the competitive edge and the proposer SMEs believe that, in the next future, the marketing success of their products will be strongly dependent from the computational speed of their software. Higher and higher performances will be, in fact, required to face increasing sub-system complexity and reduce design time. In the past, parallel mainframes were used to improve performance, but the high costs due to new hardware and software modifications limited its usage to very narrow applications. Today, GRID computational technology offers a robust and seamless environment to achieve high speed performance and, in this frame, the involved RTD Providers are committed to develop a GRID solution, able to exploit at best the latest Information Technology developments applied to the electromagnetic design. The outcome of this research project will enable the proposer SMEs to commercialise a software add-on product able to boost the performance of their existing electromagnetic design tools. An internal exploitation of the product is also planned, in order to reduce the time-to-solution for the services provided by the SMEs. |
