COLLABORATION IN BASIC SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING (COBASE)

Franc Brglez (left) and Andrej Zemva (right)

In the summer of 1999 and again in the winter of 2000, Franc Brglez hosted Andrej Zemva at North Carolina State University. Dr. Zemva is a professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia; Dr. Brglez is part of NCSU’s Department of Computer Science. The two colleagues investigated three topics in the hope of finding areas of mutual interest that can be developed into long-term projects. During Dr. Zemva’s visit of July 4-September 3, 1999, they looked at experimental design of heuristics for multi-level synthesis and optimization of combinational logic circuits. This will be a continuing topic of research at the University of Ljubljana, financed by the Slovenian Ministry of Science and Technology in collaboration with Dr. Brglez.

Dr. Zemva’s second visit (January 17-March 17, 2000) was financed in part by a grant from Slovenia, and during that time Drs. Brglez and Zemva examined the feasibility of a novel client/server architecture prototype for the implementation of a distributed Web-based laboratory design and teaching environment. This project has its roots partly in the University of Ljubljana’s digital design laboratory. Scheduled time slots limit the time students may currently spend using the VLSI design tools and toolflows there. A user-configurable client-server holds promise to create a distributed collaborative environment that will allow a number of students to access the tools after the normal lab hours using personal computers at home. This approach will be tested first in an educational environment at the University of Ljubljana in a course on Integrated Circuits taught by Dr. Andrej Zemva. Drs. Zemva and Brglez also plan to submit a proposal on this topic to the Ministry of Science and Technology in Slovenia for the support of further collaboration on this topic.

The collaborators were also able to explore new possibilities in the design and implementation of digital systems. They were interested in GUI animation capability to complement and enhance the more traditional C/C++ design capture, simulation and subsequent hardware/software co-design and verification. In June 2000, Dr. Andrej Zemva received a research grant for a long-term project from the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Republic of Slovenia "for developing new software and hardware techniques for digital systems and implementation." By November 2000, a Ph.D. student is expected to join Dr. Zemva to begin work on this project. Additional proposals are in the process of being submitted to agencies in Slovenia and the United States.