Through Harvard's partnership with Mentor Graphics Corporation, students of electronic circuit design and computer architecture at Harvard gain hands-on experience with the design automation tools used by the top industrial developers of electronic systems.
Harvard is now also a Catapult University Program member, which gives students and researchers access to the Catapult high-level synthesis platform, a Mentor Graphics tool for synthesizing circuit and system designs from high-level descriptions written in C/C++ or SystemC.
In the classroom. In the spring term of 2011, Catapult C Synthesis was used in Computer Science 148 and 248, Harvard's undergraduate and graduate courses (respectively) on the design of VLSI circuits and systems.
In research. Catapult C Synthesis has also been used in Harvard's RoboBees project. Specifically, Catapult was used to synthesize circuitry for processing optical flow information that guides robotic micro air vehicles.