Teradyne Inc. donated more than $500,000 of equipment and services to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in a ceremony Friday morning in Coover Hall.

The centerpiece of Boston-based Teradyne’s donation is an Integra J750 semiconductor test system. ISU faculty said the system will give students more opportunities to develop their designs of integrated circuits used in electronic devices.

Robert Weber, professor of electrical and computer engineering, said the ability to test and revise a design is a principle central to engineering.

“We ought to build the chip [in order] to test it,” he said.

Modern circuits are very small and complex, making traditional manual testing procedures time-consuming and impractical, Weber said. The equipment in the Teradyne Lab tests circuits automatically and significantly reduces the time needed to test a circuit, he said.

“[With traditional testing procedures] it might take you seven weeks to do one digital circuit,” Weber said. He said the cumbersome process of manual testing can keep students from knowing if a circuit design will really work.

“The opening of the Teradyne Lab will allow us to introduce testing earlier in the curriculum,” said James Melsa, dean of the College of Engineering.

Weber said Computer Engineering 210, a foundation course for electrical and computer engineering majors, will introduce a new module this fall to take advantage of the new lab. He said a graduate course in testing will also be added.

A ribbon-cutting and demonstration officially opened the new facility in 2129 Coover. Weber thanked Teradyne representatives at the ceremony — including four ISU alumni — for the gift and said he looked forward to continued cooperation between Teradyne and the College of Engineering.

“What have [these alumni] been up to? For the last three years, they’ve been diligently working to make this donation possible,” he said.

Melsa said he thought the donation would prove much more valuable than the actual price of the equipment. He likened the situation to an earlier ISU innovation — the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, the world’s first electronic digital computer, which was developed at Iowa State using a grant of $650.

“Obviously, the value of what they did was much more than $650,” he said.

Lee Moore, product introduction manager for Teradyne and a 1982 graduate of Iowa State, said he hoped students and faculty would think of the test system as a platform on which to build skills.

Moore also said he would be happy to see the lab assist in the development of skilled engineers for companies like Teradyne.

“We aim to have a large and very talented supply base, and the Cyclones have been a big part of that,” he said.