PALO ALTO, Calif., & BEIJING, August 20 -- Agilent Technologies Inc. and Peking University's microelectronics department have jointly established a System-on-a-Chip (SOC) Engineering Test Center and an SOC Testing Education Center in Beijing. The centers support policies drafted by The State Council of China to encourage development in the country's growing semiconductor market, which, according to Gartner Group, increased 38.2 percent in 2002, the largest increase in the Asia-Pacific region. The SOC Engineering Test Center is equipped with technology, including the Agilent 93000 SOC Series test system, that fulfills industrial testing requirements for scientific research projects for three key national/ministry laboratories. The SOC Testing Education Center will draw on the expertise of scholars and Agilent's test engineers to deliver technology and application-oriented training. Thousands of semiconductor engineers are expected to benefit from the creation of the center, the university said. Wang Yangyuan, director of the Institute of Microelectronics at the university and chairman of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., said, "These two centers will strengthen cooperation with the industry and among academic, research and production institutes, and will improve our research in SOC design and testing. As a result, we will be able to develop more professionals for this field and advance the IC technology industry in China." Peking University founded China's first semiconductor group in its physics department in 1958, and was involved in the earliest large-scale integrated circuit development in China. In the 1970s, its microelectronics department introduced the first three-type 1K metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) dynamic random access memory (DRAM) device. For more information, visit: www.agilent.com/see/soctest