WILD, Andreas
Motorola, 3102 N. 56 St., Phoenix AZ 85018, USA, Andreas.Wild@motorola.com
Abstract: The technology progress towards system integration, as illustrated at Motorola by the DigitalDNA™ concept, is shaping the future of the industry and the world. This accelerated evolution has profound implications on the educators, government agencies and industry. Private companies have a critical need for advanced knowledge and educated specialists produced by universities. This paper describes significant ways used by private companies to support university research and help building the skills of future specialists in specifying, developing, building and using embedded systems. Motorola programs used as illustrations, are tailored to support both developed and emerging economies. To support teaching, the Semiconductor Products Sector of Motorola operates a University Support Program, providing documentation, samples, development systems etc. to several hundred universities around the world, exposing undergraduate and graduate students to theoretical and experimental knowledge in advanced technologies. The program is accessible by toll-free telephone line, email and an Internet site. In emerging economies like Latin America, highly motivated educators used industrial sponsorship to establish the Ibero-American Science and Technology Educational Consortium (ISTEC). ISTEC defined priority programs for member universities, initiated electronic library linkages and advanced continuous education projects, established research and development labs, etc. Motorola was among the initial sponsors, supporting several initiatives , e.g. some 30 microprocessors and microcontroller labs in universities throughout the continent. The Centers of Excellence of the National Science Foundation use funding from local administration, private companies and NSF to support university research in areas of common strategic interest. Motorola is joined several such programs, providing funding, mentorship and participation in their Industrial Advisory Board. Other research consortia also enjoy sponsorship. Such contributions by private companies are an essential long term investment future. Continued success can be achieved only in a cooperative environment, taking advantage of the particular strength of all key participants, education, administration and the private sector.
Keywords: education, engineering, industry, government, cooperation
The technology progress towards system integration, as illustrated at Motorola by the DigitalDNA™ concept, is shaping the future of the industry and the world. This accelerated evolution has profound implications on the educators, government agencies and industry. Private companies have a critical need for advanced knowledge and educated specialists produced by universities.
The driving force of these transformations is the progress of semiconductor technology, fueled by the unique situation in which the reduction of the feature size used to build products simultaneously results in increased packing density, improved performance and reduced cost. Since about 50 years, this continuing trend has been described in terms of the Moore Law, stating the doubling of the number of components on the same chip approximately every 2 years, as shown in Fig. 1.
Fig. 1 Moore’s Law
To illustrate this progress, one could use as example several products. For instance, the decreasing feature size used to build PowerPC microprocessors at Motorola allows for a significant increase in the speed of operation (Fig. 2). Likewise, the complexity of a pager increased spectacularly. The first paging products have been built using no more than 17 transistors. About three years ago, the newly introduced pagers had approximately 500,000 transistor. A pager today has more than 4 million transistors. One may wonder what are all these transistors doing. Obviously, modern two-way pagers operate more like a portable telegraph than just a beeper, use a number of peripherals, a sophisticated operated system, and refined application layers, including both power efficient communication protocols and additional personal digital assistant functions. Defining the functionality, designing the system and building it are typical engineering activities.
Fig. 2 Evolution of PowerPC.
A microchip with 0.1µm transistor length, to be marketed in just a few years, will contain an estimated 500 million transistors: the GIGASCALE integration is closer and closer. Current estimations indicate that no limitations are expected until about 2020.
At this level of complexity, the profession of the engineers involved in different branches of electronics changes rapidly. Clearly, the engineers cannot be concerned with the situation of every single transistor in nicrochips with hundred of millions thereof. A much wider notion of technology results from a convergence of the different disciplines. Future generation of engineers are concerned less with the problem of building the components and more with entire systems. In particular, they must address:
New engineering tools and totally new teaching methods are emerging. The number of engineers in basic manufacturing is diminishing as a percentage of the engineering community, while those involved in defining and designing the system functionality become the dominant majority.
Fig. 3 Trend towards integrated systems
Companies involved in building the components fuelling the information revolution are facing new challenges. Fig. 3 illustrates the evolution from building components, meant to be assembled in systems by the next company in the chain, to actually taking ownership of the complete functionality. Just putting the transistor together is not enough. The semiconductor engineer is expected to build embedded systems that behave as SMART objects: Sensitive, Mindful, Attentive, Responsive, Teachable. These concepts are at the core of the new branding campaign DigitalDNA™ from Motorola’s Semiconductor Products Sector, building upon its position as industry leader in each category of embedded computing, as determined by independent surveys. This radical change in the way technology is defined and perceived, in philosophy, in the whole life, is carried out by specialists able to create new concepts, as well as by capable users. A cultural change of this magnitude must begin in the formation years. Primarily, inventing new industries and shaping new professions are some of the most valuable results of the academic research and teaching. Governmental institutions and private industry, however, can play a significant role in accelerating the progress towards the GIGASCALE integration.
Large high-technology companies like Motorola have developed various activities in support of universities, almost from the beginning of their history. Prediction for the evolution of the electronic industry in USA seem to suggest that within the next five years, the demand for engineering professionals will exceed the number of graduates by several tens of thousands. Based on such evaluations, electronic companies established new, aggressive recruiting programs, and planned actions designed to attract larger numbers of students in engineering. It is however easy to notice that, even if one or another country may experience internal shortages, on a global basis the problem of the quantity of the university graduate production is not really acute. A more serious problem seems to be rather the quality of the education, in an industry engaged in rapid change, for which the knowledge and the skills of the much needed specialists increasingly depart from the traditional job descriptions.
Motorola’s Semiconductor Products Sector operated for more than 15 years a University Support Program, providing documentation, components and development support to educators and students. The University Support Program is accessible through the corporate web site on which it has its home page, through email, normal mail, a toll-free telephone line and fax. Every quarter, the program executes a few hundred of deliveries to university students and professors, having in its active list of contacts more than 500 universities around the world.
Direct sponsorship is provided in many instances for individual professors who have a line of research considered relevant for the company. Such bilateral agreements also have the advantage that the sponsoring organization has a real interest in the progress and success of the research, providing guidance and mentoring, and being prepared to absorb the results. Normally, this joint activities are complemented by students executing summer internships or spending time otherwise at the industrial sponsor, taking advantage of various opportunities to accumulate real life experience in addition to the academic learning.
This type of support allows academic institution to develop rapidly new aspects of the curriculum, in response to industrial and scientific requests. It also allows the students to develop skills in using state of the art products such as PowerPC or ColdFire microprocessors, essential elements of many embedded applications, as in the example shown in Fig. 4.
Fig. 4 A development board featuring Motorola’s ColdFire microprocessor, part of the Computer Engineering Curriculum at the University of Florida-Gainesville (http://www.cnel.ufl.edu/~lynch/EEL5745)
When the convergence of technological interest is very strong, a company may provide high level of support to a particular institution, e.g. by founding an academi chair or a laboratory. As an example, Motorola recently funded the opening of a laboratory dedicated to exploring and implementing concepts pertinent to the DigitalDNA concept of SMART products. The MIT MediaLab, who established a successful track record in researching ubiquitous, seamless computing, and revolutionary man-machine interfaces, has been selected as host. The DigitalDNA Lab at the MIT MediaLab has been officially opened in March 1999.
Of particular interest for a company is the ability to reach a large number of academic institutions at an affordable cost. Although the benefits of the investments are seldom disputed, their link to the short term economic results of a company is less than obvious. Building a relationship and obtaining tangible results in working with universities require long term investments, only possible if the company can ensure a continuity in strategies, in business interest and often in the persons in decision making positions. Unfortunately, the situation in the industry changes faster that the graduation process would allow. The economic cycle normally leaves about 3-4 years between two successive recession, so that a student will not be able to obtain and advanced degree without seeing the industry going through at least a downturn. In a downturn, recruitment is reduced or eliminated, donations and sponsorship are cut, travel and visits are restricted to instances producing immediate business effects. All this strains the most cordial and fruitful relationships between industry and academia, as the teaching progress should ideally continue without interruption, but with considerably reduced means.
A particularly effective response to the mismatch of the time constants between educational institutions and industry is to establish consortia. An example of a successful consortium is the Ibero-American Science and Technology Education Consortium (ISTEC), sponsored over nine years by Motorola, among other companies (Fig. 5).
Fig. 5 The ISTEC home page (http://www.istec.org)
ISTEC concentrated from the beginning on identifying common needs of the Latin American universities and establishing activities and programs to address them. Among the initial ISTEC projects, the electronic Library Linkage project used electronic means to make available within 48 hours any publication to any member university. The Advanced Continued Education offers remotely classes on selected subjects, as well as Ph.D. sandwich programs, in which a part of the study is performed outside the home university, in another member university. The R&D Laboratories (more than 30) established at member universities give access to state of the art technology and help proliferate curriculum and lab programs from one member to another. The members of the consortium are able this way to present a single point of contact for the industrial and institutional partners, conveniently located at the University of New Mexico. ISTEC has currently about 60 members, the vast majority being Latin American universities.
In terms of sustaining R&D activities at universities, Motorola actively participate in consortia such as SEMATECH and SRC. The project proposals are reviewed by a considerable number of technologists, who also provide mentoring and guidance.
One of the most effective possibilities to proactively contribute to selecting the direction of academic research and teaching are centers of excellence like the ones established by the National Science Foundation at selected universities. The condition for their existence include a line of research of general interest, and the joint support of NSF, of the local administration, and of industrial sponsors. As an example, the Center for Low Power Electronics established in 1996 jointly at the Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, has constantly enjoyed the participation of 10-15 industrial sponsors. The activities are coordinated by directors from the universities, and are periodically reviewed by the industrial Advisory Board. The projects extend from new materials and transistor structures to high-level description and synthesis of electronic systems (Fig. 6). Since its beginnings, CLPE continuously improved the research and development results, and the first generation of students with advanced degrees is approaching the final part of their study.
Fig. 6 The Center for Low Power Electronics, an example of an inter-university Center of Excellence established by NSF in cooperation with local administration and industrial partners (http://clpe.ece.arizona.edu/)
Similarly, in order to stimulate technology education in Latin America, Motorola signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the University of Sao Paulo and the Sate University of Campinas, both in Brazil, to establish a pilot wafer fab for educational and R&D purposes, to be operated jointly by the two universities. Named LatinChip, this facility planned to open in the second half of the next year, providing services to all universities teaching semiconductors and integrated systems in Latin America and beyond. The facility is integrated in a wider, more ambitious program, declared a national priority by the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology, focussing on the integration of information systems (PROISI).
An increasingly popular form to introduce students to new products and technologies is organizing a contest. In fact, University contests of all kinds are currently proliferating.
In the process of migration from components to systems, the participation in a contest may provide an exceptionally effective teaching form. The subjects of the currently running contests in electronics are numerous. Most of them seem to be involved in robotics, but more open subjects or narrowly defined topics or products have also been successfully tried out, among which human power airplanes, microcontrollers, digital signal processors, etc. Also, some academic institutions run contests internally while other are open to the outside world. In all cases, learning basic principles by building a functioning application seems extremely productive. Both students and faculty enjoy the process and accumulate experience and skills that would hardly be possible when using traditional teaching tools.
Fig. 7 A fire fighting robot participating in the Trinity College contest (http://www.trincoll.edu/~robot/index.html)
Fig. 7 shows as an example from many candidates of fire-fighting robots built by students for a contest at the Trinity College (CT). A very important effect of the contests is to make sensible that defining features, designing and writing software, and integrating all elements are essential ingredients of system development. Creating the opportunity to exercise hardware/software co-design on application very close to reality has a remarkably future-oriented teaching effect.
In the Latin American universities, Motorola launched MISSION XXI, a contest for technology projects with economic justification, prompting many schools of engineering to cooperate with the School of Business, very often in the same university and very seldom communicating with each other.
The interactions between universities, governmental organizations and industry are essential in re-shaping the content of the teaching and re-defining the required skills for the electronic engineers of the next century and millennium. This paper listed some of the numerous channels and programs that support the teaching process, and contribute to meeting the challenges of the future.