Back in February 2014 ARM announced the Lab-in-a-Box (LiB) educational initiative targeted at higher educational institutions around the globe. The Lab-in-a-Box package comprises hardware development boards, professional software licenses from ARM and complete teaching materials from the ARM University Program ready to be deployed in the classroom. These include lecture note slides, demonstration code, lab manuals and projects with solutions in source. The main processor board used in the package is the F401 variant of the STMicroelectronics NUCLEO discovery board fitted with an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller running at 84 MHz with 512 kB of Flash, a useful number of I/Os and Arduino shield headers. The electronic component distributor Digi-Key has announced a partnership with the ARM University Program to distribute the LiB to higher educational institutions around the globe.

According to Khaled Benkrid, Manager, Worldwide University Program, ARM “Digi-Key is an excellent partner for distributing the full bill of materials of our education kits to a larger customer base worldwide, 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 Programme 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 Programme initiatives include Professor Workshops, online teaching/training videos, design contest sponsorships and research support.

"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," said Bob Brown, director of Academic Business Development at Digi-Key. "This initiative will benefit university academics and students in their journey to design and create technologies that will significantly impact our connected world". To find out more check out the ARM University Program announcement.