We met with Prof Takada [http://www.ertl.ics.tut.ac.jp/~hiro/hiro-e.html] and one of his Masters students – Shinya Honda – at Celoxica’s office in Yokohama. Shinya is in the codesign group within Prof Takada’s Embedded and Real-Time Systems Laboratory [http://www.ertl.ics.tut.ac.jp/]. Prof Takada explained that the codesign group is one of four within his lab. Most of the effort is focused on real-time operating systems.
About Toyohashi University
Prof Takada told us that Toyohashi University of Technology is one of two universities - the other being Nagaoka University of Technology [http://www.nagaokaut.ac.jp/e/] – that were established in the late 1970’s to cater for students who attend one of the 50 or so national colleges of technology. He explained that most prefectures have one national college of technology, and that these offer an alternative to senior high school for technology-oriented teenagers. (He added that about five prefectures have none, but others have two or three [http://www2.denshi.numazu-ct.ac.jp/koho/outline/new-map.html].) He said this was typical of government policy; the government often sets up two similar institutions in a deliberate attempt to foster competition. For example, there are also two Japanese "Advanced Institutes for Science and Technology" having similar missions - one at Nara [http://www.aist-nara.ac.jp/] and another at Hokuriku [http://www.jaist.ac.jp/]. He added that he thought this was a wise policy, and that at Toyohashi University of Technology they really do make an effort to keep abreast or ahead of what they see going on at Nagaoka University of Technology.
A senior high school education normally lasts three years, after which some students progress to university where they undertake a four-year degree course. By contrast, national colleges of technology offer courses of five years duration, which means that those who go through this system end up with an education that is roughly equivalent to students mid-way through their undergraduate degrees. This posed a problem for those wanting to continue their education. Few universities were willing to accept these students as direct entrants on to the third year of a degree course, although - ironically - Prof Takada added that other universities are now much more willing to accept direct entrants to the third year. No doubt this has a lot to do with the decline in numbers of 18 year-olds across the country; this is causing a lot of anxiety within the university system.
Consequently, most undergraduates at Toyohashi enter directly into the third year, having completed their studies at national colleges of technology around the country. Prof Takada said that they do also run courses for first and second year students to cater for the much smaller number of students joining the university from senior high schools.
Prof Takada said that the proportion of undergraduates progressing to Masters courses at Toyohashi University is between 80% and 90%. This is astonishingly high, but I imagine this is because the students who join from the national colleges of technology are probably highly motivated. He said that there are around 100 undergraduate students in his department altogether, plus another 100 or so Masters students, which means that some of their Masters students must have taken undergraduate courses at other universities.
Prof Takada said that his department works quite closely with the Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the point of view of teaching, but as far as research is concerned they’re quite separate. Unluckily for him, the research strengths of the Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering are in the field of process engineering. He said that there are no LSI design researchers for him to cooperate with.
Prof Takada’s research focus; Designability
Prof Takada said that within the field of embedded systems in recent years there has been more emphasis on the problem of complexity, and how to cope with it. He said that his main focus is that of design performance, or "designability"; he explained that one of the biggest problems in embedded systems (e.g. device driver) design is poor communication between hardware engineers and software engineers. He said the documentation that hardware engineers produce is often very difficult for software engineers to understand.
With this in mind, he suggested that having a common language based on C for both software and hardware designers would be very desirable. In reply Colin suggested that the idea of a common language is philosophically questionable, and that not everyone would accept that a common language is desirable. Prof Takada, who is involved in the Spec-C consortium [http://www.specc.gr.jp/eng/index.html], agreed that Spec-C in its present form is essentially a conjunction of two languages - one for hardware and one for software. (Handel-C is not designed to be a common language in this sense; it is only intended for describing hardware.)
Prof Takada is involved in the ITRON (Industrial TRON) Project [http://www.ertl.ics.tut.ac.jp/ITRON/home-e.html], which is part of the TRON (Real-time Operating system Nucleus) Project [http://www.tron.org/index-e.html]. Quoting from their website; "The ITRON Project creates standards for real-time operating system specifications for embedded systems and related specifications." "Since the project started, we have drawn up a series of ITRON real-time kernel specifications and offered them to the public. Of these, the µITRON real-time kernel specification, which was designed for consumer products and other small-scale embedded systems, has been implemented for numerous 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit MCUs (Microcontroller Units) and adopted in countless end products, making it an industry standard in this field. Based on these achievements, we have broadened the scope of our standardization efforts beyond the kernel specifications to related aspects, working to expand the ITRON specifications as well as embedded system design technologies."
Miscellaneous
Prof Takada says that he knows Prof Yasuura and at Kyushu University well, although his main contact there is Prof Yasuura’s colleague Prof Murakami. He said that Prof Murakami invited him to give a short course (4-day, 18-hour) in embedded systems to a group of postgraduate students at Kyushu University in October of this year. (Prof Murakami’s home page... [http://kasuga.csce.kyushu-u.ac.jp/~murakami/].)
Finally, Shinya is currently experimenting with using Spec-C code for both software and hardware design, and compiling manually.
Acknowledgement
I am indebted to Prof Takada for his feedback on this report.
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