Sun to guide IC curriculum development for China’s universities

As a result of this agreement, the Chinese Ministry of Education said it can educate students on the latest processor innovations, including chip multi-threading and software coding that take advantage of multi-threading.

By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor -- Electronic News, 2/27/2008

In an effort to meet China's demand for cultivating IC engineering talent and based on Sun Microsystems Inc’s OpenSPARC program, the microprocessor maker announced today that it has inked what it is calling a landmark, 3-year collaboration agreement with the Ministry of Education (MOE) for the People's Republic of China to help Chinese universities that participate in the program develop their own textbooks, workshops and labs programs.

MOE said it selected OpenSPARC because it is the fastest microprocessor in the world, and Sun is the only major processor vendor to freely offer its designs to the open source community. Sun reminded that both its OpenSPARC T1 and T2 processor register transfer level files can be downloaded.

As a result of this agreement, the Chinese MOE said it can educate students on the latest processor innovations, including chip multi-threading (CMT) and software coding that take advantage of multi-threading.

Jonathan Schwartz, president and CEO of Sun said in a statement, “This relationship gives The People's Republic of China access to the tools and the freedom to develop the intellectual property framework it needs to cultivate native microprocessors and microprocessor engineers, while opening a huge market for the OpenSPARC community.”

“This is a launching point for similar relationships with economies and universities worldwide, and an unmistakable endorsement of Sun's open source approach to building opportunity across software, systems and microelectronics,” he added.

Professor Zhao Qinping, vice minister of the MOE said, “We believe the cooperation will be beneficial in advancing China 's teaching and research level in the IC area.”

The collaboration covers education, research and industry development.

First, the education work will aim to train and qualify 100 to 150 educators per year with OpenSPARC technology; select universities in China to develop "MOE-Sun Excellence Courses" and leverage OpenSPARC to enhance experiments and hands-on training.

Second, the research work covers universities collaborating on research projects based on OpenSPARC; as well as establishing OpenSPARC MOE Sun centers of excellence to enhance and expand the research projects.

And third, the industry development work will establish industry-university cooperation models; bridge the gap between academic research and industry productization, help to facilitate the transformation from academic research results to industry products; and incubate IC design firms from universities to help develop the China IC industry.

Wang Yangyuan, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Science, dean of the micro-electronics department at Peking University noted that Peking University never stops its effort in integrating the front edge technology in the world and the trend of the industry into its teaching and research. “OpenSPARC T2 is one of the most advanced and open-sourced multicore CPU technologies in the industry. It provides us a great opportunity to upgrade our processor and SoC design related curricula and research. We are going to cooperate with Sun in this area to benefit our faculty and students.”

Also, Professor Wang Dongsheng, director of the CPU and SoC center at Tsinghua University and deputy director of the computer architecture committee for the China Computer Federation said chip-multi-processor and CMT technologies are the emerging trends in CPU and SoC design as they provide new topics and challenges for the study and practice of computer architecture.

The collaboration will be in full compliance with U.S. Export controls and regulations.

Scott McNealy, Sun’s chairman and co-founder will share further details on this agreement during a speech during the Sun's worldwide education and research conference, today at 11:45 A.M. PT at http://www.ustream.tv/sun.