The Massachusetts Microelectronics Center (M2C) plans to conduct a two-week (ten day) project-oriented workshop on the fundamentals of microelectronic systems education. This workshop is directed towards Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty with some experience in VLSI design but little or no experience with microelectronic systems building. The goal of the workshop is to equip the faculty with the resources necessary to develop and conduct undergraduate courses in microelectronics systems design that would culminate in rapid prototyping and testing of a system that incorporates multiple components and technologies with well-defined interfaces. Topics will include: the computer-aided engineering (CAE) approach to systems design, technology selection criteria, rapid prototyping, technology re-targeting, high- level description languages, multi-level simulation techniques, and systems test methodology. An integral part of the workshop experience is a system design project which illustrates each stage of the design process with an emphasis on design trade- offs based upon implementation technology. A combination of public domain and commercial CAE tools is used. Working in project teams, attendees build a prototype system in FPGAs and then re-target the design specification to a standard-cell CMOS technology. One month after the workshop each attendee receives a set of the chips designed by his/her team and a test fixture for use in their undergraduate microelectronic systems design courses.
