UltraSoC furthers academic support with Europractice partnership

UltraSoC IP enables academic institutions to develop full RISC-V ASICs

UltraSoC has announced a partnership with Europractice, to bring UltraSoC debug and trace IP for open source RISC-V development to a wider community and to make the company’s IP more readily and freely available for academic ASIC development. This move furthers UltraSoC’s growing support for education, particularly via the rapidly growing RISC-V open source architecture, which makes it possible for academic institutions to develop low cost solutions using open resources.

Europractice is a European Commission (EC) initiative, which assists academic and non-commercial research and teaching supporting electronic system design – specifically facilitating ASIC development through to wafer fabrication.  It supports a wide range of modern design methodologies for ICs, photonics, MEMS, FPGA and systems. Its support is available to academic institutions and publicly funded research laboratories largely in Europe. Europractice membership and access to design tools is managed by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) at the Microelectronics Support Centre, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK.

Dr John McLean from UKRI Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Head of Europractice design tools commented: “As part of the growing RISC-V ecosystem, UltraSoC brings significant value to our Europractice academic members; we are delighted they have agreed to join our successful program. UltraSoC’s embedded analytics technology will not only allow our 600 member institutes across Europe to realize their ASIC designs more quickly and easily, but also allow them to perform detailed system-level analysis on the resulting silicon.”

Having started as a university spin-out, UltraSoC sees the value in investing in a strong connection to academic institutions and the benefits in fostering talent from universities around the world. The company has an active University Program, as part of which it also provides low-cost or free IP licenses to participating institutions, for research or pre-commercial investigation.

UltraSoC recently won a significant grant from Innovate UK for a joint industry/academia project involving the Universities of Coventry and Southampton. The project will develop the world’s first on-chip cybersecurity monitoring solution for connected and autonomous vehicles.

The company works with industry bodies such as the UK Electronics Skills Foundation and Engineering Development Trust. It is currently sponsoring two UKESF awards, to be presented at the TechWorks Awards event on 6th November, one aimed at raising awareness and building skills in embedded systems engineering. The second award (sponsored with AESIN and the UKESF) is for automotive systems, functional safety and cybersecurity.