SoC Design Skills: Collaboration Builds a Stronger SoC Design Team

The success of new System-on-a-Chip (SoC) initiatives depends on the availability of well-trained SoC designers who are able to bridge the gap between software centric system specification and hardware-software implementation in novel architectures. The Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse is working with its member Universities to facilitate the education of such designers – those capable of bridging all the key competence areas required to bring about this integration. We are cooperating in the creation of an MS Certificate program in SoC Design that will be collaboratively developed and jointly coordinated. This paper briefly describes our educational initiative, and the resulting collaboratively defined SoC Skill set. Overview and Objectives Through the cooperative development of an SoC Education program, we plan to increase the number of graduates who are well equipped for the design of the next generation of Integrated Circuits [1]. Very few graduating engineers have either the point skills or the systems’ level perspective to prepare them for the challenges of embedded systems and SoC design. These skills include engineering fundamentals, significant depth in one field, and adequate breadth to work in a multidisciplinary team. Current curricula at the Greenhouse member schools (Carnegie Mellon, Penn State, and University of Pittsburgh) cover both fundamentals and advanced SoC topics. The proposed SoC Master’s certificate program will enhance the breadth and depth of the existing curriculum by building on the strengths of each of the participating schools. The primary reasons that students are not graduating with state-of-the-art skills and systems level perspectives are two-fold: i.) the cost of developing relevant curriculum, and ii.) the cost of keeping the curriculum up to date with fast moving industrial practices. For example, the installation and upgrading of the set of commercial software tools necessary to teach state-ofthe-art chip design can require a full time technical support staff member. The testing of these tools, as well as the construction of design libraries and tutorials for student use requires many additional hours that must be contributed by graduate students and/or faculty. This effort must currently be duplicated at each university, and it represents time better spent on research, student interaction, and development of new curricula. Greenhouse sponsored collaboration between the three Universities will allow us to achieve the necessary economies of scale to more efficiently educate students in the SoC state of the art through: i. shared infrastructure for design and development, ii. distributed course development and teaching, and iii. leverage of extensive existing academic programs.