Abstract

Recent years have seen a phenomenal growth in the production of microchips. Economic pressures resulting from this growth are forcing increasingly complex chip designs to be brought to market sooner. Companies wishing to remain competitive in this industry must continually seek more efficient and effective product life cycles.

There is an emerging understanding that significant productivity gains can arise from integrating digital design and testing processes. Unfortunately, current engineering training is negligent in focusing on this trend. Students mistakenly learn that design and testing are orthogonal processes.

In order to remedy this problem an integrated digital design and testing laboratory is being constructed. This laboratory, built from off the shelf components purchased through NSF funding, is an affordable and inventive solution for university engineering departments. It hosts a Virtual Automated Test Equipment (VATE) where students can test and validate actual chips built from their designs. The laboratory effectively simulates the multi-million dollar testing equipments currently used by industry.

Team Members

Instructor	Hardware Team	Software Team	Business/Planning Team
Morris Chang	John Wiacek Marcin Marjanski Vicente Mendoza Kagan Agun	Brian Holstein Randy Demsetz Wei Xiaozheng	Marcin Marjanski Luh, Ding Bang Timothy Nyberg

Presentation

The IPRO-x97-15 team will present a working prototype of the VATE. The prototype hardware has been generously made available by Hewlett-Packard. The hardware is operated through a user interface developed by students. In addition to the prototype, the IDDT website (http://www.iit.edu/~iddt/) will be displayed to illustrate how the project results are being promoted to other universities for easy adoption into existing computer engineering programs.

When : 2:00pm - 4:00pm, Friday, April 18th, 1997
Where: HUB Building, Main Campus.