Augmenting lectures in the classroom is desired when teaching analog system design. We present an all-in-one open source software suite and FPAA boards as one solution. The tools are capable of simulating and getting experimental results of mixed signal designs discussed in class. There are two options for students to get data, either remotely or locally. There is an option for students to create their own blocks, which will be shared with the class. Our goal is to empower students to gain intuition of system design and appreciate the value of circuit reuse.
The Electronic Design Automation (EDA) community is faced with an exponential increase in the complexity of the problems that it has to solve. These problems challenge the EDA community to find innovative techniques for training the next generation of researchers. This work discuss how international contests in EDA can play a pivotal role in the education and industry practices. We discuss the impact of our these contests on bridging the gap between industry and academia, training of the graduate students and building collaborations between different researchers. We compare the impact of papers originated from the effort of team winners in such contests compared to the best papers in annual International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD) conference and Design Automation Conference (DAC). Finally, we also discuss the impact of the contests on the industry organizers and how they benefit from them.
FPGA is widely used in Computer Engineering and related curricula. However, most lab exercises are performed and constrained largely in a self-contained FPGA board. A serial interface is a simple, cost-effective way to connect FPGA board to outside systems. It can be used to control a robot platform, to communicate with desktop computers, to interact with Android devices, to establish a ZigBee wireless link, and to connect to internet. This greatly expands the scope of FPGA based experiments and projects and makes them more interesting and versatile.
An undergraduate System-on-Chip (SoC) design group modelled after industry provides a rich environment for students to achieve most ABET outcomes while working in a variety of classes. The Microelectronic Skills Incubator engages a team of primarily undergraduates in the process of iteratively improving, prototyping, fabricating, and testing an ARM® DesignStart™ Cortex®-M0 based SoC. Two versions of the chip have been fabricated so far, the first time unsuccessfully, but the second time silicon was obtained which executes code and drives peripheral. Production of working silicon is exciting, but it also creates strong incentives much as it does in industry to re-use intellectual property (IP), use well-defined standard interfaces, and verify the design thoroughly before fabrication. This paper documents the steps taken to create the incubator, the experiences provided to students, and it details the ways in which students meet or exceed most ABET outcomes for an ECE program.
This paper presents a new digital test and product engineering course targeted to undergraduate seniors and master's-level graduate students. Through industrial guided labs, students were able to gain hands-on experience using an industry-grade automatic tester (ATE). Students indicated that the course provided an integration of many of the concepts from their digital core courses, and contributed to the development of skills essential to careers in test engineering or elsewhere.
This paper presents an overview of teaching hardware description languages (HDL) at Tallinn University of Technology (TUT). The structure of the course was modified by change of the approach to ground up learning through practical exercises. Different techniques to increase motivates of the students were introduced. These changes and their motivations are described in this paper. The course is taught as a first digital design modeling course for students who did not have prior digital design background. Observations and experiences from running the course over few years are described.
The relation between microstructure and mechanical properties of a 30 pct cold-rolled, recovery-annealed, and recrystallization-annealed Fe-23Mn-1.5Al-0.3C twinning-induced plasticity (TWIP) steel was studied. The thermal stability of deformation-induced twin boundaries along with a reduced dislocation density due to annihilation during recovery annealing at 903 K (630 °C) was found to be a simple, promising processing route to overcome the shortcoming of low yield strength usually associated with TWIP steels.
