AHA supports European universities

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Jun 4, 2001

Advanced Hardware Architectures (AHA) has entered into a collaborative programme with a number of universities in the UK and Europe.

Advanced Hardware Architectures (AHA) has entered into a collaborative programme with a number of universities in the UK and Europe.

The company, which recently set up a European design centre in Southampton, England, is making its Galaxy simulation software available free of charge to the universities, who will use it for teaching purposes as well as an aid to postgraduate research projects.

Among the first universities to benefit from this collaboration are the University of Ulm in Germany, the University of Ancona in Italy, the University of Lancaster in England, the Institut National des Sciences Appliqu?es de Lyon in France, and the Moscow Institute of Radio in Russia.

The Galaxy software, which normally sells for around $5000, simulates turbo product codes (TPCs) and the TPC integrated circuits produced by AHA.

It allows students or researchers to learn the fundamentals of turbo product coding, and provides an easy route for them to integrate TPCs into their own designs.

Among the satisfied users of the Galaxy software is Franco Chiaraluce of the University of Ancona, who comments: 'We have found the Galaxy package very useful.

We started studying TPC codes last year, and at present we are engaged in exploring their performance at different signal-to-noise ratios.

We are looking at a number of different decoding strategies, and have developed analytical techniques to provide a rigorous evaluation of the error floor behaviour of TPCs - which turns out to be very low indeed.' Professor Barham Honary of Lancaster University, who is also Technical Director of HW Communications - a company with which AHA is also involved in joint conference sponsorship - is also pleased to be using the Galaxy software: 'Students on masters courses as well as some of our research staff are finding it invaluable', he comments.

The AHA universities programme is currently being extended to a number of other universities in the United States as well as Europe.