A new undergraduate computer engineering curriculum, ICED, is being introduced at the University of Rhode Island. The main feature of the curriculum is a design project spanning the last three years of the major. This gives continuity to a student's studies: they will always know why they are learning a particular topic, and how it fits into the big picture. It also introduces them to long-term projects, and the requisite good documentation and communication habits necessary for its completion.

The project to be undertaken is the design, simulation and construction of a computer and its compiler, including the design of its instruction set. Further, the various students' computers will be networked together during the final integration phase of the project. Students will learn to make hardware/software design tradeoffs, as well as get hands-on experience with hardware.

A key element of the design experience is the use of modern CAD tools. The Mentor Graphics CAD tool suite will be used throughout the curriculum. By standardizing on one set of tools, the startup time for the students to learn the tools is amortized over the entire curriculum.

The curriculum has recently received funding from the National Science Foundation, and has been formally approved by the University. Students will start the curriculum in Fall, 1997.

The paper gives the rationale of ICED in depth, and describes the core courses, their activities and use of the Mentor tools, and how they interelate to achieve the goal.

Bio:
Prof. Uht is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Rhode Island. Earlier he taught at UCSD. Prof. Uht has published about twenty papers in the area of Instruction Level Parallelism in such publications as COMPUTER magazine, the MIT Monograph Series in Parallel and Distributed Computing (a chapter), the IEEE Transactions on Computers, the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, and the Proceedings of the Symposia on Microarchitecture, and Supercomputing. Dr. Uht has served on the Program Committee of Symposia on Microarchitecture. He also holds one U.S. Patent. Dr. Uht worked for four years at IBM on mainframe main- and extended- memory development. He also worked at the Laboratory of Nuclear Studies of Cornell University. He is a licensed Professional Engineer (P.E.) in the states of New York and Pennsylvania. Dr. Uht is a member of the Sigma Xi Honor Society, IEEE, ACM, and NSPE.