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 hardware 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, others on a VLIW cpu and yet 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.

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

In these same years, 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 devision 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 20 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

• R.-P.M. Berretty, A.K. Riemens, P.F. Machado, "Real-time embedded system for stereo video processing for multiview displays", Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 6490, pp. 649014 (2007), Stereoscopic Displays and Virtual Reality Systems XIV. Edited by Andrew J. Woods, Neil A. Dodgson, John O. Merritt, Mark T. Bolas, Ian E. McDowall.
   
• A.K. Riemens, R.J. van der Vleuten, P. van der Wolf, G. Jacob, J.W. van de Waerdt, J.G. Janssen, "Transparent Embedded Compression in Systems-on-Chip", Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (SiPS 2006), Oct. 2-4, 2006, Banff, AB, Canada, pp. 277-282.
  With sheets.
   
• A.K. Riemens, K.A. Vissers, R.J. Schutten, F.W. Sijstermans, G.J. Hekstra, G.D. La Hei, "TriMedia CPU64 Application Domain and Benchmark Suite" Proc. Int. Conf. on Computer Design (ICCD99) IEEE Austin, Texas, pp. 580-585, October 10-13 1999.
  This paper was presented in an invited session dedicated to all aspects of the CPU64 VLIW processor design. Session chair: Kees Vissers. Presentations by Bram Riemens (above paper on applications), Jos van Eijndhoven (architecture paper), Evert Jan Pol (paper on retargetable compiler and simulator) and Gerben Hekstra (paper on design space exploration).
  The sheets (1.4MB) of the complete session.
   
• F. Sijstermans, E.J. Pol, B. Riemens, K. Vissers, S. Rathnam, G. Slavenburg, "Design space exploration for future TriMedia CPUs", Proc. Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP98) IEEE 1998, Volume: 5, pp. 3137-3140.
   
• A.K. Riemens, R.J. Schutten, K.A. Vissers, "High speed video de-interlacing with a programmable TriMedia VLIW core", Proc. International Conference on Signal Processing Applications and Technology (ICSPAT97) San Diego, CA, pp. 1375-1380, September 14-17, 1997.
  With sheets.

US patents

• Abraham Karel Riemens, Kornelius Antonius Vissers, Robert Jan Schutten,
  Signal processing device for providing multiple output images in one pass,
  US patent 7,262,807; Priority date Nov. 23, 2001; Granted Aug. 28, 2007
   
• Robert Jan Schutten, Abraham Karel Riemens,
  Facilitating motion estimation,
  US patent 7,023,920; Priority date Feb. 21, 2001; Granted Apr. 4, 2006
   
• Kornelius Antonius Vissers, Abraham Karel Riemens, Robert Jan Schutten,
  Image processor and image display apparatus provided with such image processor,
  US patent 7,010,042; Priority date Sep. 7, 2001; Granted Mar. 7, 2006
   
• Christian Hentschel, Robert Jan Schutten, Abraham Karel Riemens,
  Video signal processing,
  US patent 6,947,098; Priority date Nov. 22, 2000; Granted Sep. 20, 2005
   
• Abraham Karel Riemens, Nathan Woods,
  Processor provided with a slow-down facility through programmed stall cycles,
  US patent 6,917,365; Priority date Aug 1, 2001; Granted July 12, 2005
   

US patent applications

• G.J. Hekstra, I. Kirenko, M.K. Bosma, F.J. De Bruijn, G. De Haan, R. Lodder, A.K. Riemens,
  Signal-processing system,
  US patent application 2007/0182859; Priority date Mar. 2, 2004; Published Aug. 9, 2007
   
• P. Van Der Wolf, A.K. Riemens, O.P Gangwal,
  Video processing circuit and method of video processing,
  US patent application 2007/0165712; Priority date Mar. 3, 2004; Published Jul. 19, 2007
   
• A.K. Riemens, J.T.J Van Eijndhoven,
  Integrated circuit comprising a measurement unit for measuring utilization,
  US patent application 2007/0088983; Priority date Oct 27, 2003; Published Apr. 19, 2007
   
• Abraham Karel Riemens, R. van der Vleuten, P. van der Wolf,
  Data processing apparatus that uses compression of data stored in memory,
  US patent application 2006/0271761; Priority date Apr. 16, 2003; Published Nov. 30, 2006
   
• Abraham Karel Riemens, Ardjan Dommisse,
  Motion sequence pattern detection,
  US patent application 2006/0209957; Priority date Nov. 26, 2002; Published Sep. 21, 2006
   
• Gerard De Haan, Marco Klaas Bosma, Frederik Jan De Bruijn, Rogier Lodder, Abraham Karel Riemens, Peter Eddy Wierenga,
  Video compression,
  US patent application 2006/0209947; Priority date Jun. 6, 2003; Published Sep. 21, 2006
   
• Christian Hentschel, Abraham Karel Riemens,
  Flexible power reduction for embedded components,
  US patent application 2006/0206729; Priority date Jul. 30, 2003, 2001; Published Sep. 14, 2006
   
• A.K. Riemens, A. Dommisse, G. De Haan,
  Recognizing film and video occurring in parallel in television fields,
  US patent application 2006/0158513; Priority date Dec. 12, 2002; Published Jul. 20, 2006
   
• A.K. Riemens, G. De Haan,
  Processing signals for a color sequential display,
  US patent application 2006/0146189; Priority date Feb. 2, 2004; Published Jul. 6, 2006
   
• A.K. Riemens, R.J. Schutten,
  Noise filtering in images,
  US patent application 2005/00117814; Priority date Feb. 28, 2002; Published Jun. 2, 2005
   
• R.J. Schutten, A.K. Riemens, P. van der Wolf,
  Motion estimation and compensation with controlled vector statistics,
  US patent application 2004/0190622; Priority date Jul. 6, 2001; Published Sep. 30, 2004
   
• R.J. Schutten, C. Hentschel, A.K. Riemens, O.A. Ojo,
  Video signal processing,
  US patent application 2004/0012334; Priority date Nov. 9, 2000; Published January 22, 2004
   
• A.K. Riemens, R.J. Schutten, S. Rathnam, A. Maccato, K.A. Vissers,
  Motion compensation and/or estimation,
  US patent application 2003/0103567; Priority date Dec. 3, 2001, 2001; Published Jun. 5, 2003
   
• I.E.J.R. Heynderickx, A.K. Riemens,
  Display system and method of adjusting display settings of a display device,
  US patent application 2003/0085926; Priority date Oct. 23, 2001; Published May 8, 2003
   
• A.K. Riemens, R.J. Schutten, J.M. Kettenis, O.A. Ojo, K.A. Vissers,
  Motion estimation and/or compensation,
  US patent application 2003/0063673; Priority date Sep. 12, 2001; Published Apr. 3, 2003
   

Note: full pdf text of US patents and applications are obtained from Free Patent Fetcher (TM).
The US patent office provides application search and patent search facilities.
EU patents search with detailed information about the status of the procedure can be found at the Online European Patent Register. I did not figure out how to obtain the full text of a european patent.