Training
Education, education education
Even though it’s nearly two decades since Tony Blair’s famous speech at the 1996 Labour Party Conference, its implication still has resonance today within the electronics industry owing to the ongoing shortage of newly qualified electronics engineers, and the concern that those new graduates are often not fully equipped with the necessary skills to be useful to the companies that employ them. Here Robert Owen, manager, worldwide university programme, Imagination Technologies, explains some of the measures that are being taken
D
espite the skills shortage in the area of CPU design, engineering students are getting a significant boost. One company has just made the unusual decision to give something back to colleges and universities around the globe that will help students gain a better understanding of the fundamentals of programmable electronics. In April Imagination Technologies, most famous for its PowerVR and MIPS products, made the announcement that, as part of its university programme, the company would start offering free and open access to a fully validated current generation MIPS CPU in a complete teaching package. CPU architecture is generally taught as part of electronic engineering, computer science and computer engineering courses. However, until now, what’s been missing from all of these courses is access to real, un-obfuscated RTL code that will let professors and students study and explore a real CPU.
Making history Traditionally, the CPUs given to academia are locked down so that only certain software can be run and the register transfer level (RTL) code is disguised in such a way that it makes it practically impossible to reverse engineer. Now, for the first time in the history of modern processors, a current CPU core has been opened up to universities. Imagination’s new programme goes by the name MIPSfpga and it is designed to bring a new CPU architecture education paradigm to universities around the world. Through MIPSfpga, university professors, students, researchers and other members of the academic community will be able to see the actual RTL code and study the inner workings of this RISC processor. Furthermore, this CPU has all the features -
12 July/August 2015
MMU, cache controllers, debug interfaces and so on - required to run a full operating system such as Linux. CPUs in other university programmes are obfuscated meaning they are effectively ‘black boxes’ to the students. Until now, none of the
microAptiv CPU core, optimised for teaching and projects. microAptiv CPUs are used in many commercial products - for example, a high performance microAptiv CPU sits at the heart of the PIC32MZ microcontroller from Microchip Technology,
capabilities. With the materials, students can configure a CPU and peripherals on a low cost FPGA platform, then program the device and run a full JTAG supported debug.
MIPSfpga is not open source in the traditional sense, but it lets students go deeper into a current architecture than they have ever been able to do before. The terms of the MIPSfpga agreement states that universities and spin-offs will not be able to use this package to start making their own chips without a licence from Imagination. They also will not be able to make changes to the architecture that they could later patent without first obtaining permission.
Hitting the ground running Some of the best engineering learning institutions in the world have already signed up for the programme, including Harvey Mudd College, Imperial College London, University College London, Keio University, Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and many others. In addition the programme has support
major architectures were available in an open form.
MIPS is one of the major CPU
architectures in commercial use today, and is one of the three architectures supported by Google for the Android operating system. MIPSfpga provides universities with a simpler configuration of the MIPS
Components in Electronics
and two of them are in Samsung’s new ‘Artik1’ IoT device.
The MIPS CPU is being offered as part of a complete free to download package for universities, together with a getting started teaching guide for professors and examples designed to enable students to see how the CPU works and explore its
from where it all started - professor John L Hennessy, currently president of Stanford University, who invented MIPS in the early 1980s. He commented, “I am pleased to see MIPS rejuvenated under Imagination’s care, and to see Imagination rolling-out this exciting new programme that brings MIPS back to academia in a big way.” MIPSfpga will create a new generation of students coming out of university who are familiar with the MIPS architecture and its application in SoC design. This will help them get a foot in the door of global semiconductor providers. MIPSfpga is also relevant to the latest developments in industry - the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) market will drive a need for lower cost and lower power CPU cores. The MIPS architecture is well suited to these applications. Through academic innovation, MIPSfpga will be part of a new wave of advancements. This is a win-win-win situation for academia, Imagination and the industry at large. Students now have unprecedented access to the inner workings of a popular CPU, Imagination will be a useful and relevant partner for academia worldwide, and the industry will have designers that better understand the exciting opportunities that FPGA systems and SoCs enable.
www.imgtec.com www.cieonline.co.uk
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