Home > News > Weekly News Archive > Weekly News from 2002-03 > April 28-May 2, 2003

CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN

I am delighted to inform everyone that the ECE department has received a large in-kind donation of software from Synplicity Corporation (www.synplicity.com) this month. The total cash value of this software donation is about $2 million.

As part of this donation we have received:

20 copies of the Synplify Pro 7.2 software for logic synthesis of FPGAs for PCs and UNIX

20 copies of Amplify 3.0 software for physical optimization of FPGAs for PCs and UNIX

20 copies of the Synplify ASIC 2.4 software for synthesizing ASICs for PCs and UNIX

20 copies of Certify 6.0 software for verification of ASIC designs for PCs and UNIX

10 copies of various books and technical documents dealing with ASIC and FPGA design.

This software donation was given in support of a research proposal submitted to the National Science Foundation on "NUSOC: Synthesis, Verification and Interface Issues in Core-Based SOC Design," written by ECE Professors Prith Banerjee, Robert Dick, Yehea Ismail, and Hai Zhou.

This software donation will also be used to support teaching at Northwestern. The software is being used for a new course ECE 397 INTRODUCTION TO ASIC AND FPGA DESIGN taught by Dr. Alex Jones during the Spring 2003 quarter to about 30 students.

I wish to thank Ken McElvain, the Chief Technology Officer of Synplicity Corporation, for making this large software donation possible. Ken wrote in his supporting letter, "We would like to see the NUSOC tool integrated with some of the leading RTL synthesis tools from Synplicity... I wish you the best of luck with your research project."

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

TRAVEL

Prith Banerjee will travel to San Francisco, CA, May 1-2 to visit companies for research collaboration.

Alan Sahakian is traveling to Snowbird, UT, April 26-29, to attend the International Society for Computerized Electrocardiology. Two papers are being presented: Jason Ng, Alan V. Sahakian, Westby Fischer, Steven Swiryn, "Atrial Flutter Vector Loops Derived from the Surface ECG: Does the Plane of the Loop Correspond Anatomically to the Macro-reentrant Circuit?" (Jason is a Young Investigator Competition Finalist); and Qin Xi, Alan V. Sahakian, Steven Swiryn, "Short-Term vs. 24 Hours Stability of Atrial Fibrillatory Wave Characteristics: A Surface ECG Study in Clinically Stable Patients."

OTHER NEWS

The last Master of Information Technology Program (MITP) Open House of the year will be held on Monday, April 28, from 6:00-8:00 p.m. in Tech Room L482.

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