The University of Southampton has won Synopsys' $25,000 Charles Babbage Grant, the first UK university to do so.
As part of the prize, the university's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will receive licenses of Synopsys' EDA software and intellectual property for two years.
"The main thing is not the money, it is access to their software and IP," Dr Matt Swabey, ECS teaching fellow, told Electronics Weekly."
He explained that universities are hamstrung by lack of access to large IP blocks with which to teach SoC design.
"No university has access to enough third-party IP suppliers to provide the blocks we need. We could design them ourselves, but we don't have the time or resources," said Swabey. "So everybody's teaching consists of designing small individual blocks, and only talking about how to assemble blocks. No one backs it up with problem-based learning."
Now it has access to such blocks, it can develop the hands-on hardware\software co-design course that was in its submission for the prize -
"The courses we are developing will be available to Synopsys, and it can pass them on to its University Program," said Swabey.
Southampton has already allocated the cash.
"We spent the money on a virtual learning environment for the first time, rather than a room full of PCs," said Swabey. "We bought Dell servers and VMware virtualisation software."
The idea of a virtual environment was another part of Southampton's prize application.
Universities in the US, Armenia, China and Russia have received Babbage grants in previous years.
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