Mentor Graphics invests in PSU high-tech computer research

Thanks to a gift by electronic design pioneer Mentor Graphics, Portland State has become a notable contender in the field of technology research and development.

The Wilsonville-based company recently awarded PSU $825,000, to be used to hire new faculty and for research on emulation. Over the next five years, $700,000 will be given to hire a new faculty member by June 2013.

The remaining $125,000 is for first rights to commercially applicable research produced.

Emulation is technology that can imitate the behavior of a computer chip and show how the chip will work with other pieces of hardware and technology.

This allows manufacturers to see if the newly designed chip will work properly without having to take the time, resources and expense to build the actual chip.

The donation will aid research in the new Mentor Graphics Design Verification and Emulation Lab at PSU. Pamela Miller, assistant dean for development and external relations at the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science at PSU, called it an extremely significant donation.

“When an industry makes a substantial gift of this nature, it can be justified in support of their research or business mission. Mentor Graphics’ financial commitment is definitely a vote of confidence,” she said.

Emulation is viewed as the next generation of verification because it can cut the amount of time it takes to verify increasingly complex chips to hours instead of days. Emulation, however, is expensive and still relatively new.

As chips continue to grow in size, emulation technology will get more critical as it will become the sole testing method.

“Mentor is in the business of providing the tools needed in the workplace, but they’re still working to help businesses use them effectively,” said Ry Schwark, spokesperson for Mentor Graphics.

“By partnering, we have the opportunity to share advanced technology with new students as well as open up opportunities for the technology to be used in more places as more students graduate with this knowledge.”

The market for emulation is still relatively small. Although the technology has been around in some form for about 15 years, it is only in the last three or four years that it has begun to take off, growing by 25 to 35 percent annually.

PSU already has two professors working in the emulation field, and plans to hire another faculty member in addition to the one who will be hired with the donation funds.

Mark Faust is one of the professors who works in the emulation field and is also chairing the committee to find the new faculty members. Faust said the research in the lab is just beginning, and that his primary purpose is to teach the technology.

Students are extremely motivated because they understand there is a huge demand for workers with these skills, he said.

“We are uniquely positioned to give both our undergraduate and graduate students exposure to real systems used widely in industry for this kind of hardware emulation,” Faust said.

Mentor Graphics has had a long relationship with PSU. The president of the company, Gregory Hinckley, is on the engineering school’s advisory board. Many employees of Mentor Graphics hold degrees from PSU.

Mentor Graphics has made donations to PSU in the past. In 2009, the company donated an emulator worth nearly $1 million to the university.

This emulator of current generation technology is the only one to have been donated within the United States.

Miller said that industry donations play a significant part in the engineering school because PSU has to be relevant to the local industry in order to be successful. PSU receives support from several companies, such as Intel, in terms of research, scholarships and internships.

“This will create a center of excellence at the Maseeh College…It is a niche we now have,” Miller said.

“Since we have a long-standing relationship with PSU’s Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science,” Hinckly wrote in an email, “it was a natural choice when we were looking for a university partner to help train a new generation of engineering graduates in this advanced technology.”