Joint initiative brings 'Lab-in-a-Box' to participating universities globally

Global electronic components distributor, Digi-Key has announced its partnership with the ARM University Program to distribute the innovative 'Lab-in-a-Box' (LiB) to higher educational institutions around the globe. The LiB contains ARM-based technology and high quality, rigorous training materials that support electronics and computer engineering courses. Since its launch in February 2014, ARM LiBs have been successfully deployed in hundreds of universities worldwide, enabling an easy migration path for academics wanting to upgrade their existing curricula to state-of-the-art technologies from the vast ARM eco-system. The Lab-in-a-Box package includes hardware development boards, professional software licenses from ARM, and complete teaching materials from the ARM University Program ready to be deployed in classes. These include lecture note slides, demonstration codes, lab manuals and projects with solutions in source, says the company. “Digi-Key is an excellent partner for distributing the full bill of materials of our education kits to a larger customer base worldwide," said Khaled Benkrid, manager, Worldwide University Program, ARM. "This is an important initiative for the ARM University Program as it offers convenient access to the hardware components that go hand in hand with our teaching materials. This is integral to our mission of equipping tomorrow's engineers with the necessary tools to drive the creation of exciting and intelligent products that transform society." The Program provides a variety of teaching materials, hardware platforms, software development tools, IP, and other resources for many academic courses including efficient embedded systems design and programming, SoC design, operating system design, and digital signal processing . Other Program initiatives include Professor Workshops, online teaching / training videos, design contest sponsorships and research support. Bob Brown, director of academic business development, Digi-Key, added: “We are delighted for the opportunity to work with ARM to bring Lab-in-a-Box to Digi-Key’s academic customers and future engineers around the globe. This great initiative will benefit university professors and students in their journey to design and create technologies that will significantly impact our connected world.” The first hardware kit available from the Digi-Key website is for the “Rapid Embedded System Design and Programming” Lab-in-a-Box, which includes the ARM Cortex-M4 based STMicroelectronics NUCLEO-F401RE microcontroller board. The corresponding teaching materials and software tools can be requested from the ARM University Program website.