VLSI Education Improvement Programs for Technological and Vocational Colleges in Taiwan — Opportunities and Challenges

 Envisioning system-on-chip design as the next industrial evolution, the Taiwan government recently launched a national Si-Soft project aiming to improve the infrastructure for the SOC based high-tech industry in Taiwan. The fabric of the Si-Soft project is the manpower development. The potential human resources in the TVE systems are thus considered as the best supply to achieve the goal of strategic man power growth. With this regard, six university alliances for promoting the VLSI education programs in Taiwan have been founded under the supervision of MOE. One of the alliances named “prototyping & layout alliance (or P&L alliance)”, is primarily designated for the technological and vocational education (TVE) schools. In the first phase of program implementation, the P&L alliance has proposed 4 tracks of courses to help the TVE schools build up their VLSI curriculum. They are 1) FPGA based design and system prototyping 2) IC back end design & layout engineering 3) high speed PCB design and 4) automatic test equipment practices. With the joint efforts of both academia and industry, the lecture materials of these courses were compiled and then promoted in the alliance schools. The MOE of Taiwan government also subsidizes the alliance schools to set up the teaching laboratories. The program goal is to educate students with practical knowledge and techniques closely related to the industry practices. In addition, the alliance also provides training programs for those faculties wishing to transfer to the arena of VLSI education. In the second phase of the program, advanced topics such as system on programmable chip (SOPC) and application specific layout will also be implemented. In this paper, we will first overview the current status of VLSI education in TVE schools in Taiwan. We will next present the alliance program and address the problems encountered as well as the measures adopted. Finally, some preliminary results and future look of the program are presented. Index Terms  technological and vocational education, VLSI curriculum, high tech man power, education renovation program.