FPGA education and research activities in Taiwan

The role of Chip Implementation Center (CIC), founded in 1992 under the National Science Council (NSC) of Taiwan R.O.C., is to provide the services for the fabrication of multi-project chip (MPC), the procurement/integration of software CAD tools, and the promotion of IC and FPGA design/testing/CAD software technology for academia in Taiwan. To date, CIC assisted 86 universities and polytechnics to install over 6000 academic licenses of FPGA design and verification tools. Moreover, CIC promotes various training courses intensively and periodically for the FPGA design flow. In year 2002, 8 kinds of courses with over 25 classes are provided to meet the demands from academia sites. More than 1000 students are trained in these classes. CIC and the Ministry of Education hold the FPGA contest yearly for training and increasing the design ability of students. The FPGA design flow, provided by CIC, is used in many of researches for implementation, verification, and prototypes. Based on the demands of academics, CIC will build a laboratory for rapid prototyping system-level design. In this laboratory, SoC (System on a Chip) and IP (Intellectual Property) designs can be downloaded into FPGA to work with a processor to verification on an SOPC (System on Programmable Chip) environment. Designs can also be mapped into an FPGA-based emulator for emulation or prototyping. By using the FPGA, many research prototypes are created, verified, and integrated on a system. In the future, CIC will keep on collaborating with the academics, devoting itself to training more well-qualified researchers and designers, and enhance the IC/FPGA/System technology level.