Educating students in embedded design

Vast Systems has announced the Vast Academic Programme which allows selected universities and other academic institutions to receive Vast technology free for educational and some research purposes.

Vast Systems - the technology specialist in embedded design-today announced the Vast Academic Programme which allows selected universities and other academic institutions to receive Vast technology free for educational and some research purposes.

The Technical University of Braunschweig, Princeton, the University of Michigan and the Korean Integrated Circuit Design Education Centre have joined the programme The Vast Academic programme provides users with a system engineering environment for the design of embedded systems and system-on-chip (SoC).

Vast's solutions are used to develop a virtual system prototype-a cycle-accurate model of the SoC or embedded system that simulates at near real-time speeds.

The virtual system prototype is used for architecture analysis and optimisation as well as for concurrent software development and hardware design.

The early availability, high performance, and observability of virtual system prototypes result in reduced time to market and improved designer productivity.

"Embedded system design has been part of the TU Braunschweig curricula since 1996".

"In recent years, embedded systems have moved from single processor architectures to distributed networked multiprocessors with complex concurrency and communication requirements".

"The Vast simulation environment enables our students to understand virtual prototyping as a powerful and realistic design and verification approach".

"They gain experience by investigating computation and communication steps in a realistic multi-processor environment".

"Achieving this level of detail and architecture insight would be very difficult, and perhaps impossible, with a physical lab prototype," said Professor Rolf Ernst, Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Technical University of Braunschweig.

"The Princeton engineering programme covers techniques for designing embedded computing systems".

"These systems are now found everywhere from cell phones to automobiles and designing them is a large technical and business challenge".

"Use of the Vast tools and models improves our ability to meet design challenges".

"Of particular importance is teaching our students how to achieve architectural constraints such as power and cost while accomplishing the required functionality," commented Wayne Wolf, professor of electrical engineering, department of Computer Science at Princeton University and author of Modern VLSI Design, now in its third edition.

"Vast has always had close relationships with the leading academic institutions worldwide that are involved in embedded system design research and education".

"Our Academic Programme is a formalisation of this effort and will encourage an even greater level of cooperation and communication with leading institutions," said Jeff Roane, vice president of marketing for Vast.

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