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Students at Luleå University of Technology work on challenging technical projects as part of their training. This is university lecturer Kalevi Hyyppä's recipe for preparing the students for the reality of industry.
In the northern town of Luleå, it is not so easy to design a fully operational receiver for the DCF77 time signal transmitter in Germany, which sends signals to millions of alarm clocks across Europe. Luleå is supposed to be beyond the range of the signal. However, this is one of the tasks university students here are faced with. In another project the aim is to build an 8x10Mbit Ethernet switch on an FPGA chip. This work is carried out in collaboration with the Swedish communication chip specialist Switchcore.
In an interview with Elektroniktidningen university lecturer Kalevi Hyyppä explains how projects like these are used to simulate work in an industrial environment. The students have to verify their own designs and to use the Internet to find solutions to problems. The textbooks do not provide the answers, as in reality. Kalevi Hyyppä says:
"When we set up the electronics training here in the mid-1970s, the message from industry was clear - teach the students to work within projects."
The electronics training at the university has become very popular. Over one hundred new computer science and electronics students join the university each year. However, finding professors willing to come to the north of Sweden has proved to be a more difficult task. Despite this, the university has managed to build up a couple of research centres focusing on for instance embedded Internet systems.
In an interview with Elektroniktidningen university lecturer Kalevi Hyyppä explains how projects like these are used to simulate work in an industrial environment. The students have to verify their own designs and to use the Internet to find solutions to problems. The textbooks do not provide the answers, as in reality. Kalevi Hyyppä says:
"When we set up the electronics training here in the mid-1970s, the message from industry was clear - teach the students to work within projects."
The electronics training at the university has become very popular. Over one hundred new computer science and electronics students join the university each year. However, finding professors willing to come to the north of Sweden has proved to be a more difficult task. Despite this, the university has managed to build up a couple of research centres focusing on for instance embedded Internet systems.
Gittan Cedervall
