CAD tool support for a multi-university SoC certificate program: The Digital Sandbox

The Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse is sponsoring an educational support program to facilitate student IC design projects and laboratories at Carnegie Mellon University, the Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Pittsburgh. Students who have access to industry standard IC design tools that are integrated in a commercial design flow will be better prepared to enter the workforce. However, these capabilities are expensive to support and not generally available within Universities. The "Digital Sandbox" program described in this paper is facilitating education by providing and supporting modern VLSI/SoC CAD tools and industry standard design libraries.