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Educational aspects

The Alliance System has been extensively used during the past eight academic years (89-97) as a practical support of two undergraduate courses: one on CMOS VLSI design, the other one on advanced computer architecture. These initiation courses lasts 13 weeks with a 2 hours lecture and 4 hours spent using the Alliance system per week, and involves 60 students and 3 teachers.

The `VLSI design' course is for students that have no previous knowledge on VLSI design and mainly come from two distinct channels: "computer science" and "electrical engineering" masters of sciences. During this course, students are required to design and implement an AMD2901 compatible processor, starting from a commercial data-sheet. The chip, with a complexity of about 2000 transistors, is designed by groups of 2 or 3 students. The main interest in this course is to teach the design methodology. Most of the Alliance tools are used during this class.

The `architecture' course focuses on the way processor architecture, from the system point of view and not from an implementation one. Typical CISC and RISC processors are studied, and part of them modelized using our VHDL subset. In that class, only the asimut simulator is used.

Alliance is also used in an intensive graduate course, for the design of the 32 bits microprocessor dlx RISC processor - 30000 transistors -. This course lasts two months, and aims only at the implementation : the high level behavioral model of the processor is given to the students. During that period of time, all the Alliance tools are used.


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