Celoxica Tour of Universities - Summary |
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The main aim of the tour had been to promote Celoxica's products, and for this reason most of the time available during each of the visits was taken up by Chris, Colin and/or Kanako giving presentations and demonstrations of Handel-C (the language), DK-1 (the design suite) and the RC100 FPGA board. A secondary aim of the tour was to gather information about relevant activities and attitudes within Japanese universities, particularly with respect to present and planned future use of FPGAs in teaching and research, and about attitudes towards hardware/software co-design, C-based hardware design languages, and reconfigurable computing. They invited me to join them on the basis that I would gather as much information as I could during the visits in relation to these issues. In some cases we found out quite a lot, but in others, unfortunately, we didnít have an opportunity to find out anything of substance due to lack of time.
According to Notkin & Schlichting (1993) the top tier universities in Japan are Tokyo University, Kyoto University, Osaka University, Nagoya University, Kyushu University, Hokkaido University and Tohuku University, with Tokyo Institute of Technology being amongst the top tier in the engineering disciplines. These are all national universities - there are around 100 national (i.e. publicly-funded) universities altogether. As far as the private universities are concerned, Keio and Waseda are widely regarded as being the best, and comparable to the best of the national universities. We visited five of these ten top universities during the tour, and by all accounts most of the professors we met within those universities in particular are very influential figures in the fields of VLSI design in Japan. It was a pity that due to limited time we sometimes came away from visits empty-handed as far as information gathering was concerned, but overall I was very impressed by the things we did get to see/learn, especially in connection with research. We discovered that FPGAs are being used within several institutions, both in research and teaching. In terms of undergraduate teaching it seems that they are being used, or at least being considered for use, at third year level. All the professors we spoke to had heard of Handel-C and were keen to find out how it compared to the other C-based hardware description languages. Most of them were already familiar with one or another (or more than one) of these languages. In general they seemed very well aware of the importance of this new paradigm. Without exception, everyone was very impressed by the demonstrations. Seeing a 200,000-gate FPGA costing $10, designed by a software engineer in a matter of weeks, performing computational tasks equivalent to the kind of thing that was demonstrated on high end Unix workstations just a decade or so ago shows the power of this new technology very clearly. Finally, just to put things into context, it is important to remember that we did not visit a random selection of academics. We were visiting academics who Celoxica already had contact with, or academics who were thought to be key figures in the areas of VLSI design and reconfigurable computing. So it would be wrong to assume that the enthusiasm we encountered is widely shared, although this may well be the case. |
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