For Beyond-5G and 6G technology, we expect a growing demand in use cases around personal robotics and similar control applications deployed at a large scale. While these are interesting new applications, they also pose risks for the European economy and society due to their equally large scale impact on personal privacy and safety. In response to this challenge, COREnext brings together 24 European partners, including major representatives from the telecommunications and semiconductor industry, to infuse trustworthiness and sustainability into the technology for future communication networks. Concretely, we intend to address two key technical gaps:
* COREnext will offer efficient and scalable accelerators based on RISC-V extensions and FPGAs as well as power-efficient interconnects to meet sustainability targets while also serving the increasing throughput and latency needs of applications.
* COREnext will develop a trustworthy-by-design architecture, which protects user privacy and platform integrity, while supporting 6G compute demands in edge servers, base stations, and client-side devices.
The work performed in the first 18 months followed a flow from use cases via requirements and a system architecture down to needed component advancements. This technical work is followed by a cadence of deliverables summarizing and contextualizing the achieved results. Main Achievements along this flow of work are:
* Use cases and scenarios were selected which would be used to guide the technical development. Requirements were formulated that will direct the validation of our achievements.
* From these requirements, an architecture for the project was defined, encompassing terminal devices, base stations, and edge cloud. Trustworthiness is considered from the start as a North Star for the technical design. From this architecture, necessary advancements beyond the state of the art are defined for individual key components.
* In particular, we identified four clusters of interacting components requiring innovation beyond the state of the art: efficient signal processing and acceleration, efficient interconnects, infrastructure authentication and attestation, and trusted digital computation.
These key components are now being developed and tested with initial results available. The second half of the project will then see a bottom-up iteration, where component results are used to refine the architecture and requirements are used to validate the delivered advancements beyond the state of the art.