Hardware and software should evolve together.
New AI models ship every few weeks. Hardware doesn't. It takes years to design, build and bring to market. The result: AI frontier models are rapidly outpacing the hardware they're meant to run on.
This widening gap is exactly why we believe hardware and software should be co-designed. Not just teams working together, but hardware decisions shaped by what software actually needs, and software built for the silicon that will actually run it. The right silicon for the right application.
From chip lab of the world to system lab of the world.
Imec has spent over 40 years as the world's leading independent research centre for nano-electronics. We are a trusted partner of the global semiconductor ecosystem, working several process generations ahead of what ships today.
We believe edge is the next frontier that needs exactly that. Edge is hard: hardware choices are fragmented, most benchmarks provide too little insight and are based on generic models, and cloud performance doesn't translate to edge performance the way anyone assumes it will. Real-world results depend on devices, software and infrastructure behaving together. This is a frontier that's only going to matter more, as intelligence moves off the cloud onto edge devices.
Closing that gap takes more than better benchmarking or testing tools, though we strongly believe it's a vital ingredient. Over time, it will require hardware and software to evolve together. Software built for the constraints of the device and hardware architectures designed for the type of software they're meant to run. That's what we mean by hardware-software co-design, and it's why EdgeLab exists: bringing four decades of silicon expertise into the system layer, where hardware and software can meet.
Hardware providers
Validate your next generation devices against real-world workloads, not synthetic tests.
Workload providers
Securely tune your workloads on real hardware with your own data.
Curious to see what co-design looks like?
Everything on this page is a promise until you've tested it. See how the loop works, or request access to try it yourself.
Neutral, and independently funded.
EdgeLab is funded by the Flanders AI Research Program, CitCom.ai and imec — not by any single hardware vendor. That's not an accident. It's how we stay neutral.
Ready to test?
EdgeLab is currently in beta and available to a limited group of partners as we refine the platform. Tell us about your workload or hardware questions, and we'll get back to you within a few business days.