This is cross post from Cadence about their Functional Verification Course. (Original post here.)
On-line education pioneer Udacity is partnering with Cadence to offer an upcoming free
class in functional hardware verification – but Udacity’s overall mission is quite
a bit broader than that. Says David Evans, vice president of education at
Udacity: “Our mission is to make high-quality higher education available to
everyone in the world, and to keep it free.”
It’s an ambitious goal for
the young company, which started last year when two artificial intelligence
experts – Prof. Sebastian Thune, now Udacity CEO, and Peter Norvig, now
Google’s director of research – decided to go on-line with a class they were
teaching at Stanford University. It went viral, was picked up by the New York
Times, and within a few weeks 160,000 students in over 190 countries had signed
up for Udacity’s first class, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.”
Today Udacity offers the
following classes:
- Beginner courses in computer science, physics, and statistics
- Intermediate courses in algorithms, web development, software testing, programming languages, theoretical computer science, differential equations, software debugging, and “how to build a startup”
- Advanced courses in design of computer programs, artificial intelligence, and applied cryptography
Functional hardware
verification will be offered in early 2013 as an advanced course. Other
upcoming courses include HTML5 game development, interactive rendering, and
introduction to parallel programming.
Interactive Experience
While the classes are as
challenging as traditional university classes, they take advantage of new
technology. “Instead of having a traditional lecture style, where the professor
is talking at the students, we have a much more interactive, engaging style
with exercises, videos, and short explanations,” Evans said. Students generally
can’t interact with instructors in real time, as they could in a physical
classroom, but Udacity provides discussion forums at which students can get
answers from other students or instructors.
Udacity classrooms are “open”
24 hours a day and students can progress at whatever pace they like. They are
available to anyone with Internet access. Accreditation is “something we’re
working on,” Evans said.
Evans, who is currently on
leave from his post as a professor of
computer science at the University of Virginia, noted that only a very small
fraction of the world’s population can afford to take four years to attend
brick-and-mortar universities. “Traditional universities are organized around
the same ideas and processes as they were 1,000 years ago,” he said. “Our
belief is that by using technology we can make the cost per student really low
while delivering a high-quality learning experience.”
So how does Udacity make
money? The business model is still under development, but one possibility is
through add-on services such as certified testing. Recruiting fees present
another possibility. Here, Udacity would identify students who could be
valuable to potential employers, and the employers would pay recruiting fees to
find them.
Functional Verification Class
So why teach hardware IC
verification? This is not, after all, a topic that’s likely to draw 160,000
students in a few weeks. But as I heard at the DVCon conference earlier this year, many chip design
companies are struggling to find qualified verification engineers, a job
function that requires a combination of hardware and software skills that many
university graduates lack.
“We’re really excited about
the hardware verification class and the partnership with Cadence to make it
available to many more people,” Evans said. “Certainly it’s in an area we think
is important. In terms of useful, employable skills, it will provide a
tremendous amount of value.” The Cadence partnership was announced October 18 along with Udacity partnerships with Google, nVidia, Microsoft, and
Autodesk.
The verification class is
titled Functional Hardware Verification: How to Verify Chips
and Eliminate Bugs. It will be taught
by Cadence verification experts Axel Scherer and Hannes Froehlich in early 2013.
(Scherer is a frequent Cadence blogger, and you can read his post and see a
short video about the Udacity class here.) The
training will be based on the e Hardware Verification Language,
but does not require a knowledge of e up front.
Scherer said that Cadence is
offering the class in response to global demands for verification training, and
the difficulty in reaching many parts of the world with in-person training. The
class can serve design engineers moving into verification, part-time
verification engineers who only use directed test, college students, engineers
who want to broaden their skill sets, and unemployed engineers looking to get
back into the labor market. Students should be familiar with programming in
general and have some understanding of object-oriented programming.
Course content will include
basic verification environments, adaptable verification environments,
verification concepts, functional coverage, data checking and scoreboards, the
Universal Verification Methodology, debugging, and environment control and
synchronization. The class will leverage automated techniques such as
constrained-random test generation.
For more information, see the
Udacity
web site and the functional hardware
verification class description.
By Richard Goering
