ARM Seminar and Impressions of Zhou Ligong

Today I attended ARM’s 2004 Technology Seminar with Professor Wang Dongqing from the Software Institute.

Got up at 6am, took the bus from Jiading to the main campus, then subway lines 3 and 1 to Xujiahui. Arrived half an hour late, but the first speaker — ARM’s COO Brown — had just stepped on stage.

The morning talks were mostly in English, covering ARM architecture, market, and future development. Quite IC-design oriented, different from IT. I learned a lot of new terms.

After lunch, Zhou Ligong — a leading figure in China’s MCU industry — gave a talk titled “From 8-bit to 32-bit.” Unlike the polite earlier speakers, Zhou was assertive and imposing. His talk on UML and OO in embedded systems, the convergence of PC and embedded development, and software engineering thinking was eye-opening. Despite being a company boss, he’s still an engineer at heart.

One funny remark: he said China’s graduate education is often “famous students make famous advisors” — i.e., grad students become famous and elevate their advisors. I immediately thought of advisors who force students to churn out IEEE/ACM papers while taking first author credit. Ironic.

The seminar ran until 5pm with a lucky draw (I never win anything). Ate too many egg tarts at afternoon tea — skipped dinner entirely.