ARTICLE OCTOBER 2001

"Integrated Information-Communication-Entertainment (ICE) Terminals - one of the MEDEA+ key technological priorities for Europe's transformation into an information society"

A) Market trends / user expectations

Many cultural and technological barriers have already disappeared among and between the worlds of information technologies, telecommunications and entertainment. Digital technological convergence in hardware and software has clearly become the basic trend which influences all medium and long-term R&D in the intelligent terminals domain.

Future terminals will demonstrate increasing functionality in order to fulfill these requirements. Through miniaturisation of input functions, processing, storage and output capabilities, such future "terminals" will therefore be full systems in their own right rather than specialised sensing and actuating devices.

User needs for terminals are strongly segmented depending in particular on the usage environment and the available budget. Users therefore require a wide variety of easy to use ICE products for which microelectronics (and software) are the key enablers.

B) MEDEA+ View on integrated "Information-Communication-Entertainment Terminals"

The MEDEA+ aim in this ICE Terminals work area is not only to provide new attractive features and facilitate miniaturisation.

The objective is also to stimulate new developments in various sectors which, like MPEG, GSM, DVB, or DECT, will eventually become at least de facto standards in the international markets.

C) MEDEA+ activities / projects in this work area

The "Integrated Terminals" area is very wide, a complete coverage of this field is therefore impossible. Nevertheless the 5 MEDEA+ projects in this field deal with a variety of interesting items in the terminal field.

"FUST" (A202 - Future Storage) deals with general architectures, prototype IC's, prototype systems and intellectual property of mass storage systems.

"IMM4DTTV" (A203 - Integrated Modem For Digital Terrestrial Tv) aims to develop a VLSI solution for digital, terrestrial TV striving also for the definition of the final DVB-RCT specifications for the ETSI standardisation process.

"Secure Pocket Multimedia" (A207) aims to make a cost effective solution available for consumer equipment while "ICAM's" (A211 - Intelligent Camera) aim is to develop a complete, intelligent CMOS camera system.

"Trip" (A208 - Technology for Re-configurable Intellectual Property) is a project that also could have been categorised in the "System Design" field, but due to its focus on a design methodology for multimedia standards and also for communication systems it has been grouped in the "terminals" working area.