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In this educational experiment, an interesting technical issue also emerged. For security reasons, networking of the system was not allowed behind Compaq's firewall. To get around this, the system was accessed through a phone line and a local ISP at 56 Kb/s rate. In spite of this, the initial downloading of the Applet was reasonably fast and device characterization was confortably responsive.
Sponsors
The MIT Microelectronics WebLab project was launched in the Spring of 1988 thanks to a seed grant from Microsoft of $3.5K, a software donation from Microsoft with a value of $8K, and a Windows NT server donation from Intel with a value of $6K.
In the Spring of 1999 the MIT Microelectronics WebLab received a donation of a HP4155B Semiconductor Parameter Analyzer and a HPE5250A Switching Matrix from Hewlett Packard. This donation was valued at $76K.
Further development of the system over the academic year 1999-2000 was funded by three MIT Alumni Funds: the Class of '51 Fund for Excellence in Education, the Class of '55 Fund for Excellence in Teaching, and the Class of '72 Fund for Educational Innovation. Total support received from these funds was about $20K.
In the Summer of 2000, the iLab project was launched under sponsorship of the iCampus alliance between Microsoft and MIT. The MIT Microelectronics WebLab received funding of $78K for the first year and $73K for the second year.
In the Fall of 2000, the MIT Microelectronics WebLab received a donation from Agilent Technologies of seven device test fixtures valued at $37K. This allowed us to exploit all the capabilities built into WebLab 4.0 that incorporates the switching matrix.
In the Summer of 2000, we received a grant of $65K from the Singapore-MIT Alliance to develop a second system to be used in the SMA program.
In the Winter of 2000, we also received a donation from Advanced Micro Devices of two Athlon-class servers valued at $11K. This will allow us to achieve a significant enhancement in system reliability and performance.