Engineers at Work
ETA Design Center was inaugurated
at the technopark of Istanbul Techical University (ITU) in 1991 as an enterprise
of the ITU-ETA Foundation. The Foundation itself was established in 1989 by
five leading original equipment manufacturing companies and ITU to promote university-industry
cooperation in the area of electronics engineering. Membership, now standing
at seven, is representative of such business sectors such as consumer electronics,
telecommunication, appliances and control. All operations of the foundation
is supervised by a board of trustees comprising CEOs of member companies, the
dean of the Faculty of Electrical and Electronics engineering and the head of
Electronics Department.ETA Design Center, being the first initiative of the
foundation, was charged with the three-fold task of :
a) providing all necessary services for designing, prototyping and volume production
of industrial ASICs as demanded by member companies or by any interested third
party;
b) offering conscultancy and training in the related areas; and
c) monitoring global ASIC development trends at large and generating R&D project
proposals accordingly.
The ITU Electronics Department, having been active in researching and teaching microelectronics since 1976, was designated as the main source of expertise in supporting these activities. What follows is a brief description of the infrastructure of ETA Design Center. All design work is done on a cluster of five workstations. The software environment is Cadence Design Framework version 97a. ETA Design Center became a member of the ChipShop silicon foundry brokerage organization in 1994. This enables ETA costumers to access low-volume production at such European foundries as ES2, AMS, MIETEC and TCS. It is also worth mentioning that ETA Design Center is backed up by the Eurochip-member VLSI design Laboratory of ITU, which also runs ten seats of Cadence DFW II toolset on a cluster of SunSparc LX and Sun Classics. This facility is used primarily for research and education and also as a training center for ETA. The laboratory staff, comprising two professors and six mostly Eurochip-trained research assistants, also continue the senior design staff of ETA. ETA has access to a large body of qualified graduate students to be employed as designers in commercial projects. The projects completed up to now at ETA represent a variaty of design styles including cell-based digital, full-custom high-performance digital and analog-digital mixed mode, in all CMOS. Design experience ranges from telecommunication switching circuits to consumer products including such diversities as switched-capacitor fuzzy controlers, threshold-logic products, base-band modems, high-performance drivers, etc.
Engineers at Work