Universities Adopt CoWare Processor Designer as Teaching and Research Tool

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 09/22/08

Two universities have recently gone public with their use of CoWare Processor Designer for teaching application-specific processor architecture. Both École Polytechnique de Montréal in Canada and RWTH Aachen University in Germany have adopted the tool, which enables developers to program chips for specific uses.

Application Specific Instruction-set Processor (ASIP) usage is growing in a variety of industries, including consumer electronics, automotive components, industrial automation devices, wireless, and networking security.

"This year we offered an application-specific processor design course for graduate students for the first time," said Pierre Langlois, associate professor in the department of computer engineering at the École Polytechnique de Montréal. "Gaining practical experience with Architecture Description Languages such as LISA and with design tools such as CoWare's Processor Designer is now an essential part of computer engineering education at the undergraduate and graduate levels."

"We have made LISA-based processor design a standard and popular element of the computer engineering curriculum at RWTH Aachen University," said Rainer Leupers, a professor with the Institute for Integrated Signal Processing Systems at RWTH Aachen University. "Moreover, we have recently founded a new Embedded Processor Design short course at the ALARI institute at the University of Lugano. Thanks to the automation provided by CoWare Processor Designer, the students are able for the first time to customize and implement a processor for a given application within a few working days."

CoWare, based in San Jose, CA, sells electronic system-level design software and services. Additional higher ed users include the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Universita di Bologna in Italy.