Participants at the recent CCC/SIGDA Workshop on Extreme Scale Design Automation discussed various ways to motivate students to consider EDA-related careers. And few approaches have cast a broader net than an EDA-related Massive Open Online Course taught by Rob Rutenbar, professor of computer science at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign).
Held in late February 2014, the workshop was convened to envision the future of EDA and to outline future directions and strategies for EDA research (see recent blog coverage here). Rutenbar gave a keynote speech titled "Teaching the First EDA MOOC: Reflections on the Experience and Opportunities for the Discipline." The talk detailed his experiences in presenting a free course called VLSI CAD: Logic to Layout, available to anyone on the planet through MOOC provider Coursera.
Rutenbar's course initially ran March-May 2013, about the same time that Cadence partnered with Udacity to present a MOOC titled "Functional Hardware Verification." Taught by Hannes Froehlich and Axel Sherer of Cadence, that course is still available from the Udacity web site. Meanwhile, a second version of the Rutenbar MOOC was launched in March 2014.
Rutenbar said his MOOC taught the "classic ASIC flow" and is basically the same class he taught 15 times at his previous post at Carnegie-Mellon University. Topics include models, synthesis, logic design, placement, routing, and timing. The physical class takes 15 weeks and involves 948 PowerPoint slides (he counted), 20 slide decks, and about 52 hours of lectures.
A Different Format
But MOOCs don't have to run for 15 weeks, and they can stop and start at any time. So how does a physical class get turned into a MOOC? Rutenbar took his 948 slides and distilled them into a series of 69 videos averaging 15 minutes in length. The MOOC comprises 8 weeks of instruction and 2 weeks of homework, and takes about 17 lecture hours, translating into "50% to 60% of my regular course done in one-third the time."
Rutenbar believes that a 15-minute video is preferable to a two-hour "talking head" video, and not just because of limited attention spans. "In much of the planet you can't download a two-hour video," he said. "It will never get there and it will never be streamed. So keep the videos short."
Homework consists of eight weekly assignments, and since they're true-false or multiple choice, instructors have to be creative. "All this stuff has to be automatically graded," Rutenbar said. "You can't do serious math. You can't do something where the answer is two or three pages of astute handwriting with mathematical derivations that you rely on grading by putting a PhD student in front of it."
Software projects include Boolean data structures, binary decision diagram (BDD) based logic network repair, quadratic placement, and maze routing. Students uploaded a file that was then evaluated by automatic graders. It's all ASCII-in, ASCII-out. "We don't run code. It's too hard to compile and run everybody's code," Rutenbar said.
Another task that took some creativity is coming up with EDA tools that several thousand students can use - without licensing or IP issues. The answer, Rutenbar said, is to "carefully select open-source software and write everything else." Software available to students included EDA classics such as a SAT solver, Espresso (logic minimization), SIS (multi-level synthesis), and a linear solver. This software was accessible through a web portal.
How Many Students?
The "elephant in the room" concerning MOOCs, Rutenbar said, is that lots of people start these courses and not too many finish. While some 17,000 prospective students signed up for the course, only about 500 took the final exam and finished. However, several thousand students watched the videos. And students came from everywhere on the planet, he noted - including Africa, South America, and other places not really known for high-tech.
Why teach this MOOC? "I think every vibrant discipline needs an on ramp," Rutenbar said. "It needs a way to get you into the heart of the discipline so you understand the ideas and the problems." In universities today, he noted, not many people are teaching foundational EDA, and perhaps 10 students are taking a class that 100 would have taken a decade ago.
"I taught the first EDA MOOC, and I feel pretty good about that," Rutenbar concluded. "I did it because I believe this material is important and interesting. I did it because somebody has to be generating some excitement for the vibrancy of this discipline. And the only way to do that is at a global market scale."
NOTE: Rutenbar will speak about his experiences with this MOOC June 5, 2014 in a Sky Talk (short keynote) at the Design Automation Conference. Click here for details.
Richard Goering
Related Cadence Blog Posts
Do You MOOC? Expanding Access to e (IEEE 1647) Verification Training Globally
It's Coming: Udacity CS348 Functional Hardware Verification Course Launches on March 12, 2013
"Extreme" Scale EDA Workshop Discusses Research and Funding Priorities