The Higher Education Commission (HEC) has decided to establish Electronic System Design Automation (Esda) Centre at National University of Science and Technology (Nust), Rawalpindi.
The decision to establish Esda at the cost of Rs 29.00 million was taken in HEC's departmental development working party (DDWP) meeting.
The centre would operate in tandem with NC (Nust) consultancy and TIC (Tech Incubation Centre). Currently TIC is incubating 04 electronic companies requiring Esda facility. The centre will also provide infrastructure for generating high quality projects and research work for MS/PhD programmes at Nust campuses.
The centre would support the academic and research activities through integration of MS/PhD courses with the Nust curriculum as well as provisioning of a comprehensive R&D facility for faculty and MS/PhD students.
The Esda centre would support research and development in the disciplines of embedded system design, multimedia processing, data acquisition & signal conditioning, virtual instrumentation, automated test equipment, industrial control and automation and programmable communication systems.
The Esda centre is meant to build prototype systems with the potential of commercialisation of selected products. Hence, the centre will cater for R&D development of prototype and subsequent commercialisation at industrial scale. In this context, 08 indigenous projects undertaken by technology incubation centre (TIC) of Nust for product development and subsequent commercialisation would utilise the design automation tools available at Esda centre.
It is hoped it will produce reasonable number of high quality technical professional post-graduates in the discipline of electronic system design and contribute significantly in solving the research and development problems of private and public sector industries of the country.