Strengthening Scientific Education and Research with AMD University Program

The AMD University Program (AUP) empowers faculty with AMD technologies to enhance teaching, enrich learning, and advance cutting-edge research. Through strategic partnerships with academic institutions, the program creates a vibrant, global ecosystem with students, researchers, and educators at its core.

Academic communities worldwide benefit from a wide range of resources from AMD experts, including software development tools, hardware products, training, and technical support. The AUP program keeps professors up to date with the latest developments and enables them to deliver curricula that prepare students for the changing needs of industry and society.

We are proud of our partnerships with academics and remain committed to the continued advancement of teaching and research through our University Programme. For example, our relationship with the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, goes back more than 20 years. The recent AUP-supported RFSoC textbook, written by Professor Bob Stewart’s team, has been downloaded more than 6,000 times by readers in over 90 countries worldwide.

In India, the Special Workforce Development Program, also known as the Chips to Startup (C2S) Program, is a five-year program run by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, India. The program reaches out to the top 100 academic institutions in India and aims to train 85,000 professionals for the workforce by incorporating System-on-Chip (SoC) and System-Level Design at the undergraduate, graduate and research levels, thereby accelerating the growth of fabless design initiatives. We have worked closely with our academic partner CoreEL Technologies Bengaluru and our sales organization to mainstream AMD technologies into academia in India. In 2023, the Indian government’s C2S program purchased 5,000 AMD Vivado software licenses and approximately 3,000 development systems targeting AMD adaptive computing devices.

We also developed the Urbana development system with our academic board development partner, Real Digital, and academic colleagues at the Digital Systems Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The three partners collaborated to open source the board and course materials for broader university adoption.

The Urbana development system is a low-cost, FPGA-based educational platform designed to host a wide range of project-based learning in digital systems and microprocessor design. The system includes the Urbana board and a full-featured version of AMD Vivado professional design tools for design entry, simulation, synthesis, and FPGA programming at no additional cost. The coursework covers a wide range of topics, including combinational and sequential logic, timing analysis, microprocessor design, software/hardware co-design, and system-on-chip methodology.

We also released Riallto, a new exploratory framework for AMD Ryzen AI PCs in 2023. Through a set of open source materials, Riallto introduces students, educators, researchers, professional engineers, and hobbyists to the emerging AI topics of spatial computing and neural processing units (NPUs) to help them develop a conceptual understanding of these exciting ideas and a strong intuition about how they work and what they can do.

We also partnered with GPU Technologies and Engineering Group to donate AI lab equipment to the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU) and the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) in Taiwan. The donations will establish the Pervasive AI Computing and Communications (PACC) Lab, which showcases our company’s unique range of server-to-end AI technologies. AMD is well-positioned to power the end-to-end infrastructure that enables AI solutions that support a wide range of innovative teaching and research in academia.

To learn more about the AMD University Program, visit: https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/university-program.html.

Originally published in AMD 2023-24 Corporate Responsibility Report.