Professional career

Bram Riemens is born in Eindhoven, the Netherlands in 1962. He graduated from his Polytechnic study Electronics (Dutch: HTS-Electrotechniek) in 1984. In the same year, he started with Philips Research as research assistant in a CAD support group to setup infrastructure and tooling for an IC design project. In 1986, Bram joined a project aiming at a complete integrated design environment for IC design, providing a consistent and uniform operating environment for a wide collection of IC design tools. In 1987 Bram moved to a research group on "CAD for VLSI systems", and focus shifted towards design data management and version control. In 1991 the scope was further extended to multi user aspects and cooperation patterns and methods. In this period, Bram developed into one of the founders of the innovative concepts and became the main software architect of the research prototypes.

In 1994, Bram got a position as Research Scientist in the "TV systems group" of Philips Research. In this function, he led the hardware and control software implementation of the VSP system: a fully programmable real-time video prototyping system. The IC's, programming tools, control tools and PCB's were all developed within Philips Research and commercially exploited (both inside and outside Philips).

In 1996, Bram joined the research project aiming to design a 64 bit VLIW Processor core (at that time, one of the largest cross-disciplinary projects in Philips Research). Bram became responsible for the application software and benchmark team. In 1998, Bram got the position of Senior Research Scientist and his interest was directed to explore overall architecture of embedded video systems for the consumer market. In particular the understanding and exploration of heterogeneous and dynamic systems and the relation between algorithms and architectures in the context of a cost competitive market.

From 1999 to 2001, Bram headed a research team that defined a heterogeneous video system for scan rate conversion (commercially known as "Natural Motion" in TV sets). Some of the functions were implemented in software, targetted for a VLIW cpu and another part was implemented in parameterized dedicated hardware for which a bit-true reference model was built.

Apart from these official projects, Bram has setup real-time video infrastructure aiding as research and development facility for harddisk recording. Furthermore, Bram initiated the first Philips internal open source project: a standard library and tool suite around a Philips proprietary video file format. Almost a dozen colleagues contributed to the toolset, which grew to about 120,000 lines of C and C++ code in a few years, and has become the Philips de-facto standard for research and development departments.

From 2002 to 2005, Bram taught on heterogeneous systems for video processing in the "advanced video signal processing" course.

In 2002 and 2003, Bram headed a research project team to explore future IC architectures for CE devices. A cross disciplinary cooperation with software, IC and embedded system architects to assess the tradeoff between dedicated hardware and more programmable solutions over the next 10 years.

By the end of 2003, Bram left Philips Research as Principal Scientist and started at Alphamega, a privately owned webhosting company as Principal System Architect. Topic: enterprise wide automation systems for small and medium size companies with emphasis on internet related remote computing, control and reporting systems.

In October 2004, Bram joined Philips Research again to work on 3D television and display systems.

In October 2006, the Philips Semiconductor division was separated into an independent company NXP. Bram decided to join this newly formed endeavour as Principal Scientist in the research group "Systems and Algorithms".

Bram published at a few conferences (see list below) and contributed to more than 30 patent applications in the field of video signal processing algorithms and their implementation in embedded system architectures.

Over the years, Bram has built extensive experience in software architectures and system design with a particular interest in design methodology and team culture in a multi-disciplinary environment. Bram always enjoyed the combination of conceptual innovations and the tension between the harsh reality that provides the environment where the innovations must operate.

External Publications

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Conference papers

EU patents

US patents

US patent applications

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EU patents search with detailed information about the status of the procedure can be found at the Online European Patent Register.