GregariousMatt
New member
My name is Matthew Morrison, and I will begin as an Assistant Professor at the University of Mississippi in August. As part of my position, I am building a Computer Engineering graduate program from the ground up, as well as a VLSI System Design Research Lab for CMOS, ASICs, Embedded Systems, Mixed-Signal Systems, and Microprocessors. I want to start a thread to ask for advice on challenges and solutions in building a program. I met Daniel Nenni at the Design Automation Conference, and he recommended I start a thread here.
What are some skills/projects that you would like to see more Bachelors/Master’s students have coming out of school that you believe are not adequately taught or fostered at the university level? I would like to take these ideas and develop them into projects for my students.
On the research end, I believe that Ole Miss has great potential for being a manufacturing and fabless semiconductor research center. They recently built a "Center for Manufacturing Excellence" where they have educational focus on undergraduate interdisciplinary manufacturing education. As you mention at the end of your book, the financial burden of semiconductor design is the a significant challenge, as well as attracting new capital. I see the potential for collaboration in EPSCoR states in developing Fabless labs.
On the academic end, I am looking to develop 5-6 courses. What tools would you recommend for augmenting these courses? What other ideas do you have for building a successful program?
Advanced Digital Systems and Architectures - Organization and design of digital computing systems. Register transfer language; computer architecture; memory; ALU; addressing modes; Parallel Processing; Multicores; Cloud Computing.
Synthesis and Optimization of Digital Circuit Systems - Architectural and logic-level synthesis algorithms , developing a module library in VHDL, coding a synthesis algorithm in C/C++, and using architectural/logic synthesis systems to synthesize designs.
Reconfigurable Computing in FPGAs and Embedded Systems - Introduce internal design of reconfigurable architectures and FPGAs, the CAD tools and algorithms to program these architectures, and application development using these reconfigurable architectures.
CMOS/VLSI Design - Design, layout, simulation, and test of Design custom digital CMOS/VLSI chips, using a CMOS cell library and state-of-the-art CAD tools. Digital CMOS static and dynamic gates, flip flops, CMOS array structures commonly used in digital systems. Top down design example of a bit slice processor.
Design and Analysis of Fault-Tolerant Digital Systems - Basic concepts of dependable computing. Reliability of nonredundant and redundant systems. Dealing with circuit-level defects. Logic-level fault testing and tolerance. Error detection and correction. Diagnosis and reconfiguration for system-level malfunctions. Degradation management. Failure modeling and risk assessment.
Mixed Signal Integrated Circuit Design - An advanced circuits and systems analysis course that computationally efficient manual and computer-aided methods for analyzing the electrical dynamics of both linear and nonlinear models of active networks destined for monolithic realization principally in complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) transistor technologies.
Lastly, I would like any advice or feedback on how you think I could involve SemiWiki in the education process. Do any of you use this forum to augment their courses? If so, what are some pros/cons of such an approach?
Thank you for all of your help and time.
Very Respectfully,
Matthew Morrison
What are some skills/projects that you would like to see more Bachelors/Master’s students have coming out of school that you believe are not adequately taught or fostered at the university level? I would like to take these ideas and develop them into projects for my students.
On the research end, I believe that Ole Miss has great potential for being a manufacturing and fabless semiconductor research center. They recently built a "Center for Manufacturing Excellence" where they have educational focus on undergraduate interdisciplinary manufacturing education. As you mention at the end of your book, the financial burden of semiconductor design is the a significant challenge, as well as attracting new capital. I see the potential for collaboration in EPSCoR states in developing Fabless labs.
On the academic end, I am looking to develop 5-6 courses. What tools would you recommend for augmenting these courses? What other ideas do you have for building a successful program?
Advanced Digital Systems and Architectures - Organization and design of digital computing systems. Register transfer language; computer architecture; memory; ALU; addressing modes; Parallel Processing; Multicores; Cloud Computing.
Synthesis and Optimization of Digital Circuit Systems - Architectural and logic-level synthesis algorithms , developing a module library in VHDL, coding a synthesis algorithm in C/C++, and using architectural/logic synthesis systems to synthesize designs.
Reconfigurable Computing in FPGAs and Embedded Systems - Introduce internal design of reconfigurable architectures and FPGAs, the CAD tools and algorithms to program these architectures, and application development using these reconfigurable architectures.
CMOS/VLSI Design - Design, layout, simulation, and test of Design custom digital CMOS/VLSI chips, using a CMOS cell library and state-of-the-art CAD tools. Digital CMOS static and dynamic gates, flip flops, CMOS array structures commonly used in digital systems. Top down design example of a bit slice processor.
Design and Analysis of Fault-Tolerant Digital Systems - Basic concepts of dependable computing. Reliability of nonredundant and redundant systems. Dealing with circuit-level defects. Logic-level fault testing and tolerance. Error detection and correction. Diagnosis and reconfiguration for system-level malfunctions. Degradation management. Failure modeling and risk assessment.
Mixed Signal Integrated Circuit Design - An advanced circuits and systems analysis course that computationally efficient manual and computer-aided methods for analyzing the electrical dynamics of both linear and nonlinear models of active networks destined for monolithic realization principally in complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) transistor technologies.
Lastly, I would like any advice or feedback on how you think I could involve SemiWiki in the education process. Do any of you use this forum to augment their courses? If so, what are some pros/cons of such an approach?
Thank you for all of your help and time.
Very Respectfully,
Matthew Morrison
