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TITLE: SOC CURRICULA AND CONSORTIA
Several new education programs have been initiated in the last
few years to prepare graduate students with meaningful
experiences in SoC design.
In Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse is a consortia
formed by Carnegie Mellon University, Penn. State and the
University of Pittsburgh to offer a broad SoC experience. Each
graduate student receives the M.S. from his/her home institution
but can enroll in courses offerred by one of the other schools
and thereby obtain a SoC certificate. The program will have its
initial offering this Fall. A description of the skills required
for SoC design and the various course offerings are given at:
DIGITALGREENHOUSE
In Sweden, a SoC design cluster has been formed to unify the
efforts of universities, research institutes and industry. The
initiative has received a government grant of 50M Euros, of which
13 are reserved for research and education. Lund University,
Linkoping University and the Royal Institute of Technology are
participating in developing a MS program which consists of 40
credit units of courses (9 months) and 20 credit units of
thesis work (6 months). For additional information, access:
SOCWARE.
In Scotland, a system-level integration MSc program has been
in progress for a couple of years. The Alba Centre combines
the resources of four universities into a special program which
is focused on IP authoring and integration for system-on-chip
designs. Concurrently, an ARM platform is being developed
for education and research purposes onto which student designs
can be integrated. Experiences in courses already taught were
described by Patrick Lysaght at the
2001 Microelectronic Systems Education Conference.
His presentation slides are on the conference website. His
course specifically addressed the task of authoring soft IP
blocks and using OpenMore for rating them. He determined that a
workable approach was to have the students evaluate and then
improve existing IP (e.g., VHDL description of the Sparc CPU:
LEON). For more information about the
consortia, access: SLI.
In Canada, the government has pledged 25M dollars over the next
five years to build an infrastructure for SoC research and
education at Canadian universities. The effort is being
coordinated by the Canadian Microelectronics Center (CMC) to
provide SoC-based design flows, silicon intellectual property
and three SoC platforms built for research purposes: a
high-performance network-processing platform, a low-power
Bluetooth RF platform and an FPGA prototyping platform. CMC does
not intend to redistribute commercial IP but will provide such
cores as processors, memories and A/D converters as part of its
SoC research platforms. Moreover, the research network will set
up a secure IP management system to facilitate the
exchange of university-developed IP. For additional information,
access: CMC.
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FILENUMBER: 1013
BEGIN_KEYWORDS
SOC CURRICULA CONSORTIA
END_KEYWORDS
DATE: July 2001
TITLE: SOC CURRICULA AND CONSORTIA
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