Empowering Scientific Education and Research Through the AMD University Program

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

Academic communities around the world 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, ensuring they can deliver curricula that prepare students for the evolving needs of industry and society.

We take pride in our partnerships with academia and remain committed to the continuous advancement of teaching and research through our University Program. For example, our engagements with the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland date back more than 20 years. Recently the AUP-sponsored the RFSoC textbook, authored by Professor Bob Stewart’s team, has been downloaded more than 6,000 times by readers in more than 90 countries worldwide.

In India, the Special Manpower Development Program, also known as the Chips to Startup (C2S) Program, is a five-year program run by India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. The program reaches the top 100 academic institutions in India and aims to train 85,000 specialists for the workforce by incorporating System-on-Chip (SoC) and System Level Design at the bachelor’s, master’s, and research level, thereby catalyzing the growth of fabless design startups. We have worked closely with our academic partner CoreEL Technologies Bengaluru and our sales organization to proliferate AMD technologies throughout academia in India. In 2023, the Indian government’s C2S program procured 5,000 AMD Vivado™ software licenses and almost 3,000 development systems, targeting AMD adaptive compute devices.

We also co-developed the Urbana development system with Real Digital, our academic board development partner, and academic colleagues at the Digital Systems Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The three partners collaborated to make the board and course material open source 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 comprises the Urbana board and a fully featured version of AMD Vivado professional design tools for design entry, simulation, synthesis, and FPGA programming, at no additional cost. The related course covers a broad range of topics, including combinational and sequential logic, timing analysis, microprocessor design, software/hardware co-design, and system-on-a-chip methodology.

In 2023, we also released Riallto, a new exploration framework for AMD Ryzen™ AI PCs. Through a set of opensource materials, Riallto introduces students, educators, researchers, professional engineers, and hobbyists to the newly 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 for how they work and what they can do.

Additionally, we collaborated with the GPU Technologies and Engineering Group to donate AI laboratory equipment to the College of Electrical and Computer Engineering at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU) and the College 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 that showcases our company’s unique range of server-to-edge AI technologies. AMD is well positioned to power the end-to-end infrastructure enabling AI solutions that support a wide range of innovative teaching and research in academia.

Learn more about the AMD University Program at https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/university-program.html.

Originally published in AMD 2023-24 Corporate Responsibility Report.