(in a top-down manner) of system oriented electronics, integration of ... engineering/science program is greater than ever. ..... Computer Science programs.
Session 11a3 New Computer Engineering And Microelectronics Curriculum Development For System-On-Chip Era H. Tenhunen* and J. Isoaho* * Royal Institute of Technology* University of Turku** Electronic System Design Laboratory Laboratory of Electronics and Information KTH-Electrum 229 Technology 16440 Kista, Sweden 20014 Turku, Finland
Abstract - In this paper we will review the general motivation and principles for establishing system oriented M.Sc. degree programs with focus on system level integration issues. The key thrust has been the close interaction between microelectronics, communication and multimedia techniques, and information systems. As a part of the curriculum renewal, an explicit need for recycling and retraining practicing engineers and teachers has been recognized as a standard operational mode for the future academic and industrial career. This has resulted in a reevaluation of the balance between the fundamental issues and application specific issues as well as their time distribution and scheduling in the overall curriculum.
1.
Introduction
Both at Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden) and at University of Turku (Turku, Finland) a new overall curriculum planning is under progress with first-yearstudents entering the program in the fall term 1999 and 2000. The key motivation for the strategic restructuring of the electronics engineering education for the M.Sc. in EE degree (4.5- 5 year program corresponding to 160 credit unit courses and 20 credit unit thesis work, where one credit unit corresponds 40 hour work effort) is the change in the students´ background and their interest profiles, as well as the rapid evolution of the technology base and the fundamental restructuring of the industrial infrastructure in the areas around Stockholm and Turku. The key industrial evolution in the Nordic countries is the development of mobile communication industry from a small niche market to global industries with mobile terminal sales volumes exceeding currently the number of PCs sold per year. Because of the early lead in the Nordic countries on mobile services, a very large-scale industrial activities (mainly led by Ericsson and Nokia) are located within a 2- hour travelling time from Stockholm and Turku. These industrial activities correspond roughly 40-50 % of the global R&D investment and production in mobile radio systems. The characteristic feature of these industries is the high system knowledge contents of the end products and services as well as the very aggressive system knowledge capture and the integration towards the single chip solutions, and the effective large-scale utilization of the leading hardware and software technologies. Because of this, the contents of the
polytechnical education and its structure have been reevaluated resulting to a new over all curriculum structure towards M.Sc. degree in EE. The new features of our curriculum approach is the redistribution of mathematics and physics with the close content integration of the study field over the full study period (instead of the first two years as done currently). In addition, we provide an introduction (in a top-down manner) of system oriented electronics, integration of communication theory and systems, computer science and engineering, and microelectronics, all in one unified package. The structure of this paper is as follows: first we introduce the strategic requirement analysis reflecting our unique industrial situation in system integration, we present the development strategy fulfilling the short and long term strategic needs, and finally we outline our curriculum approach with a specific example towards system-on-chip issues.
2.
Requirement Analysis
The key element in curriculum evolution is the change in the society requirements [4,5] as well as change in the interest and knowledge profiles of the students. In the technical area, the main change in the industrial needs has been the shift from the conventional industries towards the information technology and digital media industries. In these specific areas the demand and supply of engineers at the different educational stages does not currently match. This has resulted in the specialized and strategic local efforts to solve the long-term unbalance. Due to latencies in the normal academic system, a short-term solution is not feasible. The only short term possibility is the continuing education programs and convergence programs for the practicing industrial staff having basic academic background, or newly graduated students who like to enter this new and exciting area. Also the student interest profiles has changed since the time the faculty members were students. Maybe our experience profile prior university studies made the relevance of the transistors and basic electronics quite clear and desirable aspects of education program. However, with
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Session 11a3 the current generation of the Internet centric students, the basic abstraction levels of hardware are gray the boxes such as PCs and home entertainment equipment. Thus a new motivation and approach is needed from the first years in order to attract students to select the necessary study profiles for the society and industries. Especially the first 2-3 year mathematics, physics, circuit theory and linear systems, and analog and digital electronics course approaches must be critically re-evaluated in order to attract students’ attention and motivation. Unfortunately, the classical curriculum content such as circuit theory, linear systems, devices and electronics cannot be ignored due to fact that the physical realities are coming back even to system level designs because of the deep submicron technology effects. Thus a traditional approach by just ignoring some classical themes and adding the new material will not work anymore. Thus a need for a joint electrical engineering and computer engineering/science program is greater than ever. Either the approach based on just increasing the number of courses or adding more to the content of the individual courses will not work due to undesired increase in the study times and in the graduation rates. The key thrust need to be clearly moved from the system or technology driven programs towards a program, which has the focus on the system level integration. In this paper we try to present one of the first attempts for such a program. In addition of the above very generic issues, few specific issues have emerged from the analysis of industrial activities in our close-proximity [4,5]. The characteristic feature of our closed industrial partners is fast economic and industrial expansion, which seems to continue over the foreseeable future. This is combined with the fast technological developments, both with respect to the technology integration and to the system platforms, and very short product life-times requiring very quick and responsive R&D cycles. This type of environment will set new social and technical competence requirements for the newly graduated engineers entering to such industrial life. In technical terms, most of the new engineering jobs are associated to the system level integration; to merge communication, digital signal processing, computer engineering and microelectronics to the competitive end products. For the workflows specific to each company, the identified weak points prone to errors and misunderstandings are the different types of interfaces; both the abstract and the physical ones. Such examples can be the HW/SW interfaces, the mixed signal AD/DA interfaces, the algorithm and architecture matching, and the interfaces to large volume production. Unfortunately, many of these issues falls between the existing professor chair in European university system and are thus difficult to get integrated as a fundamental knowledge and issues to the curriculums. In addition of being a detailed specialist, a broad
understanding of the system and technology issues for the trade-off and feasibility analysis is required in all work phases. The key technical areas relevant for next generation system engineers who effectively can contribute to the new mobile system technologies and applications are listed below: •
IT-services and end-user behavior
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Distributed and parallel systems
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Networking and protocols
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Digital communication and multi-media techniques
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Software engineering
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Computer architectures and compiler techniques
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Embedded (real-time) systems and embedded software
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Computer Aided Engineering techniques
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VLSI system and circuit design
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RF/analog/mixed signal IC design
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Microelectronics technology
It is obvious that the above list maps over many existing degree programs. Next we describe our attempt to integrate these to a coherent M.Sc. level engineering program and describe a System-Level Integration/System-on-Chip Design as a specific specialization point in such program.
3.
Development Strategy
Traditionally the role of European university has been two folded - research and education without heavy interaction between them. Also, the universities have been living a separate life independently on the industrial needs, or at least very slowly adapting to them. This evolution has resulted in many universities strong programs in computer science and technical areas close to physics. As we see it now, the university role is nor totally independent on industry neither fully controlled by it. There are three principal tasks for the universities: education, research, and supporting and guiding functions. In principle the support of industry means that the industries have competitive level of workers now and in the future, where as the guiding of industry means that the universities should find the path for the industries to follow. We see different forms of education, supported by very strong basic and applied research, as the way to improve the competence of the local industry. Research creates results, education transports them out, and guides and feeds the research activities. The system education should be built in a way that it really affects on the methodologies and
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Session 11a3 technologies used by the industry and the quality of their current and future products. Due to large knowledge and skills needed in the system level integration, the educational system should deliver several different student profiles in order to provide deep enough studies for building and shaping the individual competence of the students. Our curriculum program development is based on four important criteria: •
Complete overall coverage for polytechnical education.
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Flexible and strategically targeted study profiles.
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Coherent overall program with multiple entry points to the program for industrial staff and students from other educational programs (e.g. entry to first or third year levels).
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Deep technical competence and specialization for providing success for graduated students in their first work place.
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Co-operation and team work competence and appetite for life-long learning.
The most important criterion for building of a new study program is the coverage of the overall polytechnical education. It should cover fully the technical competence areas needed by the aimed local industry sector Because the students are profiled already from earlier stages than before, this may cause some drawbacks with respect to the generality of the offered education. Also the continuous technical and technological evolution will make some knowledge and skills obsolete on 5-10 year perspective. To counteract these effects, specialized actions need to be created to support the lifelong learning. Firstly, specialized courses and short programs on near future important themes need to be created for the continuing education of the practicing industrial engineers. These short courses address, in company specific manner, the key internal competence development short-term challenges for next generation products. This type of short course activity provides also an excellent media to the university for the research result dissemination. Secondly, a convergence education program with few specialized and time-dependent focus profiles need to be created addressing the mediumterm issues. Here the convergence education means dedicated degree related programs for the students having already an academic background in other areas and having practical industrial experience. In some sense these can be compared to the popular MBA degree programs, however, the major difference being here the focus in the technical specialization. Currently the main medium-term need is within system-level integration area, where a new 2 year programs need to be created leading to the M.Sc. degree
with the entry point corresponding at least to 120 credit unit (3 year, 1 credit unit corresponds 40 hour work) engineering or physical science background. The most effective format to this type of education is international educational program where a part of the targeted students have an immigrant background, and this type of degree program will help them to penetrate to the local work market and in general to the society more efficiently. We believe that this type of convergence education will be a necessary part of different academic curriculum in order to enable the recycling of engineering skills and expertise from different areas to the current “hot” strategic areas. We feel that building an engineering curriculum, which provides a lifetime education today, is a mission impossible and our overall approach just reflects this fact. We see already today a mixture of students in early 20s and late 40s and early 50s taking the degree programs. We can assume that this trend will be stronger with time, especially in societies where a strong social support network and governmental funding exists for the re-education, like in the Nordic countries.
4.
Offered Curriculums
In order to meet the above described structural and technical challenges, both Royal Institute of Technology and University of Turku have very recently created new educational curriculums with specialized multiple entry points. All these curriculums are university level ones with strong connection to the on-going research in the participating departments, and nominal 4.5 years (in practice over 5 years) study time leading to Master of Science degree. B.Sc. level education is provided by other educational institutes resulting to unfortunately low transfer of students from B.Sc. engineering programs to M.Sc. level engineering programs. Thus the situation in this respect is quite different from US educational system. In order to enable this flow a rigid formal requirement system will be abandoned and an entry point to 3rd or 4rd year level is created. At Royal Institute of Technology a new educational program in information technology is designed. The program has a common entry with four specialization areas •
Microelectronics with focus on IC and photonics technologies and related physical issues
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System-level integration and VLSI design with focus on methods and architectures for system-on-chip integration
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Communication system techniques with focus on modern digital communication methods and analysis techniques, computer system communication and networking. 0-7803-5643-8/99/$10.00 © 1999 IEEE November 10 - 13, 1999 San Juan, Puerto Rico 29th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 11a3-26
Session 11a3 •
Distributed information systems with focus on information systems in organizations, intelligent services and large-scale heterogeneous distributed information and database systems.
The common aspects in these programs is the overall curriculum structure consisting 180 credit unit studies divided to •
100 credit unit base block
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60 credit unit competence block
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20 credit unit M.Sc. thesis
The students will start with a common first year in general mathematics and physics and general introductory courses in the areas of microelectronics, communication and distributed systems. During the first spring students will start to profile to one of the directions above by selecting individual theory and methods courses to their curriculum. This early specialization is made possible by bringing the area specific fundamental courses earlier in the program and moving some of the physics and mathematics courses to the later stage in the program. This also will make feasible to adapt these traditionally fundamental courses more to the needs and requirements within each specialization. E.g. in modern physics courses (like quantum physics) more emphasis can be devoted to the phenomena relevant to semiconductors and photonics than generic atom physics issues. Similarly the mathematics courses can be coupled to linear systems and signal processing or discrete mathematics according to specific needs and requirements in each specialization. Above all, this redistribution will enable the effective recruiting and multiple entry points to students from industries and other universities (e.g. from 3 or 4 year educational programs outside of our universities) to some specific specialization program. This can be done without the drawback that these external students are severely handicapped because of the lack of courses and knowledge in basic sciences. The overall credit unit distribution to the different basic study items is as follows over the overall study period: •
Mathematics including the linear systems and deterministic and stochastic systems, 20-40 credit units
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Physics including the semiconductor and device physics, 20-30 credit units
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Computer science and engineering including the programming and communication, 20-40 credit unit
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Specialization, 60-80 credit units including the thesis work.
The student has a large independence and responsibility in selecting the courses and specialization and thus new combinations for specialization can be build-up. Also course content and forms need to be developed to be attractive to the students because each areas and each laboratories are competing over the students, because the basic university funding is directly coupled to the number of students who have the courses. One example of such specialization combinations, to be described later in detail, is System Level Integration to which the students at 3rd and 4th year will be recruited from the students who have either microelectronics or communication system background. Important revitalization aspects in this program are: •
Offering technical courses during the first two years, which is an opposite situation than in our earlier system with heavy load of mathematics and physics during the first two years of studies
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Combining laboratory work and small individual or two person group mini projects in each course. Even in some courses, the project based final examination can be an elective alternative to the final written exam.
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Offering a large design and analysis project at the end of 2nd spring term in order to enhance student’s own responsibility and engineering creativity.
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Focusing in many areas on the system issues and building the courses and learning experiences top-down and on problem based manner. The key issue will be here that the student will realize that any system is composed of multiple level of abstractions and description hierarchies and different possibilities for hardware and software implementations. However, the emphasis of these issues is in large degree a course and a teacher specific issue.
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Especially during the first 3 years the emphasis is more on the analysis skills with clear transition to the synthesis and design based skills at the final stage of the educational program. A teamwork aspect is emphased, although the Masters thesis documentation is still an individual contribution. We hope that this approach will follow the natural personality and maturity development of each student.
However, many of the above issues will require closer interaction between faculty members in different disciplines. This process was enabled in mid-90s via establishment of long-term interdisciplinary graduate schools where Ph.D. students and active faculty members are already involved. A long-term success in this M.Sc. undergraduate program will require even more intensive interaction between faculty members.
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Session 11a3 Finally, at Royal Institute of Technology will still have traditional separate Electrical Engineering program and Computer Science programs. By intention, these three programs will be offered parallel over the foreseeable future. The target number for the entering students in the new program is 150 students per year during the first two years, with increase to 300 students after that. The "classic" electrical engineering program will stay at 250 entering students and the computer science program at 120 students. In University of Turku a similar process has been launched mainly in response to enhance the economic infrastructure of the western Finland. The key focus areas are system engineering, electronics and telecommunication. In addition of normal university degree programs, a new M.Sc. level engineering degree program has established with focus on strategic combination of telecommunication and electronic implementation techniques. The curriculum details show small differences to the one described above. Despite of the different start-points and educational systems in these two countries, the obvious convergence to similar structures and contents were striking. The major differences are based on differences in resources and focus in on-going research portfolios in these two universities. Obviously, during the implementation phase closer interaction and cooperation need to be carried out including exchange of faculty, joint teachers and joint courses, joint offerings of specialization profiles and course packages to student from both universities.
5.
Specialization System-on-Chip
One of the specialization subjects both for M.Sc. program as well as for convergence education programs is system level integration on silicon or system-on-chip (SoC). This area consists of intersection of signal processing, communication, computer engineering and microelectronics. In our program SoC is offered both to students who have started either microelectronics or communication system study plans. Thus both physical based circuit view and computer science based abstract view of the designed objects and the design process itself is presented in the course portfolio [1]. The key technical issues to integrate a heterogeneous system and to improve the design efficiency and quality are the new knowledge to be covered, which can be identified as: •
Functional design and validation: Functional design for heterogeneous ASIC´s consisting of multiple Digital Signal Processors (DSP) and RISC core processors, with embedded software integrated on chip memories resulting to much higher design abstraction and specification levels in the design process requiring new
description languages, synthesis techniques and validating methods. In addition, HW/SW design for such embedded multiprocessor system is a key issue. •
IP based design: Significant improvement of reusability and enhanced reusable macro generation in all phases of the design are required, resulting to more efficient Intellectual Property (IP) encapsulation. IP based design will lead to product group specific hardware and software architectural platforms.
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Interconnection centric design: Design optimisation strategies in deep-submicron, where the cost of an interconnection is much higher (for area, power consumption, speed and cost) than a cost of logic cells or transistors results in a new design paradigm. New chip and system level synchronisation strategies for complex circuits are required in order to obtain high system performance and standardised way to integrate complex IP to designs. Thus this will define on-chip and off-chip communication architectures, a necessity for platform thinking and efficient IP usage.
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Physical system integration: Low power design strategies for deep sub-micron design for orders of magnitude reduced power consumption are needed in portable applications requiring new efficient power management techniques as well as emphasis of codesign of system and implementations aspects.
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SoC specific circuit techniques: High performance embedded analog, mixed- signal and digital circuit techniques for an integrated heterogeneous system.
These areas need to be covered in parallel from the three different perspectives: (i) circuit or physical integration point of view, (ii) functional and algorithmic integration point of view, and (iii) hardware and software target architecture point of view [2]. In the following paragraphs, a first attempt to this direction is described for physical and architecture view.. Circuit view In the basic digital circuit techniques course, a circuit level understanding of logic abstraction is developed. The course aims to provide analysis of bit change impacts on logic nodes from point of view of circuit speed, power and area/cost. This corresponds traditional LSI/VLSI courses in many universities, however, the currently used technology base is based on 0.25 micron CMOS. In our VLSI design course the focus is in digital system engineering addressing different fundamental issues associated to the interconnects and related signalling and synchronisation problems for on-chip and off-chip communication at electrical level. Thus we aim to provide
0-7803-5643-8/99/$10.00 © 1999 IEEE November 10 - 13, 1999 San Juan, Puerto Rico 29th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 11a3-28
Session 11a3 analysis what happens when the bit moves from place A to B. The emphasis is on the deep submicron (0.1-0.25 micron) critical circuit design issues. The Physical architecture of ULSI systems course will tie together the technologies and phenomena associated to the chip and system packages and their impact to the system architectures. We adapt here a unified approach where the interconnectivity issues and conceptual design goes through the whole course. More detailed description of these courses is provided elsewhere in this conference [3]. On the design methodology, modern design and specification methods are addressed as well as techniques handling the necessary teamwork aspects. Logic and system level synthesis is introduced from efficient reusability and utilisation of IP. It is also necessary to expose students to examples in the form of the project work, which requires actual concept and physical integration across multiple disciplines, to which students were exposed in their earlier studies. As an elective element students can choose also course in advanced design algorithms and CAD methods.
Architecture view A good mastery of the design process is useless if the student have no idea to what it can be executed. Thus the above design process need to be complemented with application oriented HW/SW architecture platform knowledge. Thus the critical elements in this package module is software and architecture techniques for distributed embedded systems including hardware close programming and device drivers. The following courses are examples of such architecture view for SoC. In the Embedded software and distributed system techniques for system-on-chip integration course the focus is on the software and compiler techniques for systems consisting multiple programmable processing elements on-chip. Especially focus is on HW/SW interfaces and device drives for integrating such chip level systems to final products. In the SLI architectures course the difference to standard computer architecture courses is to prioritising the system-on-chip specific trade-offs and architectural strategies. However, the approach is similar quantitative analysis approach as used in modern computer architecture courses. In the Conceptual design of integrated systems course an analysis of existing large scale system is performed (in order to put the previous course content in practical perspective) and trade-off analysis for alternative solution strategies are developed at conceptual level. Key themes are functionality definition, architectural refinements of HW/SW platforms based on performance estimation and analysis. Physical integration issues are introduced as performance and cost constraints including low level performance analysis, architecture partitioning
strategies. Typical application example can be e.g. a complex basestation for mobile radio systems.
6.
Summary
In this paper we have outlined our strategy for the new curriculum structure towards System-on-Chip era. The key challenge is a working interaction between different disciplines and availability of resources for education due to research intensive content.
References [1] A. Hemani, M. Mokhtari, J. Isoaho and H. Tenhunen, "A Structure of Modern VLSI Curriculum", In Proc. of 7th IEEE ASIC Conference and Exhibit, Rochester, New York, Sept. 1994. [2] L. Hellberg, A. Hemani, J. Isoaho, A. Jantsch, M. Mokhtari, and H. Tenhunen, "System Oriented VLSI Curriculum at KTH", In Proc. of the International Conference on Microelectronic Systems Education (MSE97, 1997. [3] H. Tenhunen: “Physical Architecture of ULSI Systems” Course Development, this conference. [4] H. Jaakkola & H. Tenhunen: Impacts of Information Technology in Finnish Industry. A Survey of Two Studies. IOECD Science, Technology, and Industry Review vol. 12, 1993. pp. 58-80. [5] Tarja Juhola, Hannu Tenhunen, Ivan Ring Nielsen, "Adoption and Utilisation of ASIC Technologies in European SMIs, in Proc. of 1994 IEEE Int. ASIC conference, Rochester, NY, USA, 1994.
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