Moving Beyond Borders

Article by Rochelle M. Sabarillo

Integrated Circuit (IC) design is an essential part of the Philippine semiconductor and electronics industry. Nowadays, the three-way partnership formed among industry, academe and government is helping the country achieve its vision of becoming a globally competitive electronics hub by 2030. Colleges and universities are encouraged to include IC design in their curriculum for electronics engineering which paves way to enabling local engineers to develop skills necessary to enter the workforce that aims to develop circuits that would be useful for the industry and the country's economy.

To take part in achieving this goal, Mindanao State University - Iligan Institute of Technology (MSU-IIT) Microelectronics Laboratory of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Technology (DEET) is doing its best to help neighboring colleges and universities by organizing and facilitating trainings that will enable them to acquire and develop skills in analog and digital circuit design.

For this year 2019, the researchers of the μC-IC project of MSU-IIT, a DOST- PCIEERD funded research, went to Surigao City as trainers last April 25 to 26 to hold a training-workshop about Hardware Description Language (HDL) to be implemented in Field- Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) at Surigao State College of Technology (SSCT). The trainees, with a total number of twenty two, were faculties from various departments of the college.

During the opening portion of the training, Professor Xi Zhu, a visiting research professor from the University of Technology Sydney, presented a lecture about “Millimeter Wave IC Design for 5G and Radar Application” with the students and faculties of SSCT as the audience. This is then followed by Professor Jefferson Hora of MSU-IIT with the talk about engaging students and faculties in the field of microelectronics in the academe and pursuing graduate degrees at MSU-IIT using the available scholarship programs provided by thegovernment.

Prior to the actual training session, the trainers had already prepared the workstations of the faculty trainees. The software needed was successfully installed in each of the computer used for the training and each trainee was given his/her own FPGA board to be configured during the laboratory exercise. The actual training started with a lecture given by Engr. Ramon Cristopher Calam about the comparison between programmable devices. The topics of the lecture include the definition and advantages and disadvantages of Arduino, FPGA, and ASIC on each other. Following the lecture was the first laboratory exercise of the trainees which is about tool familiarization. This exercise allows the trainees to be taken through the process of using the simulator tool and FPGA board. The next lecture about “Introduction to Verilog” was presented by Engr. Robert Nericua followed by the next laboratory in which the trainees learned to apply the basic knowledge acquired to code a system in Verilog HDL format. The last lecture which was shared by Engr. Calam talks about Finite State Machines (FSM) with details concerning state machine types, encoding style, FSM description in Verilog, and partition schemes. The trainees were then given time to do the corresponding laboratory exercise.

During the closing program, all faculty trainees were given with certificates of completion for having attended the lecture series and finished the given laboratory exercises. Message of appreciation was also exchanged between SSCT and MSU-IIT during the closing ceremony. The training ended successfully and SSCT is looking forward for more training to come. MSU-IIT will also continue to move beyond borders in spreading the importance of IC design in Mindanao in the near future.

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