Teaching embedded systems with FPGAs throughout a computer science course

ABSTRACT

Although embedded systems have been around for quite a long time, just in recent years they have attracted major industry and academic interest. There is a perception that a computing paradigm shift is taking place, and so the need to provide computer science students with the required expertise in the field. In this paper we describe our experience of using a reconfigurable computing platform throughout a number of courses. By doing so we allow students to get acquired to embedded systems concepts and practices under different contexts in the normal curriculum. The application of this strategy have allowed considerable gains for students taking embedded system courses, research projects in the field, and also professional activities.

REFERENCES

• 1: Altera Corp. Nios Development Kit, Stratix Edition, May 2004. http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/altera/kitnios_1S10.html.
• 2: Altera Corp. SOPC Builder, May 2004. http://www.altera.com/products/software/system-/products/sopc/.
• 3: Altera Corp. UP2 Design Laboratory Kit, May 2004. http://www.altera.com/education/univ/kits/unv-kits.html.
• 4: Embedded systems design: an introduction to processes, tools, & techniques, CMP Media, Inc., 2001
• 5: V. Bonato, E. Simes, M. M. Fernandes, and E. Marques. A gesture recognition system for mobile robots. In Proceedings of ICINCO-1st International Conference on Informatics Automation, Control, and Robotics, Lisbon, Portugal, 2004 (to appear).
• 6: Katherine Compton , Scott Hauck, Reconfigurable computing: a survey of systems and software, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), v.34 n.2, p.171-210, June 2002 [doi>10.1145/508352.508353]
• 7: S. Cotofana, S. Wong, and S. Vassiliadis. Embedded processors: Characteristics and trends. In Proceedings of the 2001 ASCI Conference, Netherlands, 2001.
• 8: eCos. eCos Home Page, May 2004. http://eCos.sourceware.org/.
• 9: Don Edenfeld , Andrew B. Kahng , Mike Rodgers , Yervant Zorian, 2003 Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, Computer, v.37 n.1, p.47-56, January 2004 [doi>10.1109/MC.2004.1260725]
• 10: L. Fernando Friedrich , John Stankovic , Marty Humphrey , Michael Marley , John Haskins, A Survey of Configurable, Component-Based Operating Systems for Embedded Applications, IEEE Micro, v.21 n.3, p.54-68, May 2001 [doi>10.1109/40.928765]
• 11: J. Glossner, J. Moreno, M. Moudgill, J. Derby, E. Hokenek, D. Meltzer, U. Shvadron, and M. Ware. Trends in compilable dsp architecture. In Proceedings of The 2000 IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems, USA, 2000.
• 12: R. A. Gonçalves , P. A. Moraes , J. M. P. Cardoso , D. F. Wolf , M. M. Fernandes , R. A. F. Romero , E. Marques, ARCHITECT-R: a system for reconfigurable robots design, Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Applied computing, March 09-12, 2003, Melbourne, Florida [doi>10.1145/952532.952665]
• 13: Opencores.org. Ethernet mac 10/100 mbps:overview, May 2004. http://www.opencores.org/projects.cgi/web/-ethmac/overview/.
• 14: David A. Patterson , John L. Hennessy, Computer organization & design: the hardware/software interface, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1993
• 15: B. R. Rau and M. Schlansker. Embedded computing: New directions in architecture and automation. Technical Report HPL-2000-115, Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Sept. 29 2000.
• 16: C. Teuscher, J. O. Haenni, F. J. Gomez, H. F. Restrepo, and E. Sanchez. A tool for teaching and research on computer architecture and reconfigurable systems. In Proceedings of the 25th Euromicro Conference, volume 1, pages 343--350, Milan, Italy, September 8--10 1999. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA.
• 17: W. Wolf and J. Madsen. Embedded systems education for the future. Proceedings of the IEEE, 88(1):23--30, Jan. 2000.
• 18: K. Wong and N. Topham. OneDSP: A unifying DSP architecture for systems-on-a-chip. In Proceedings of ICASSP-2002 - International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing, USA, 2002.
• 19: Xilinx, Inc. Press release no. 03131, May 2004. http://www.xilinx.com/prs_rls/silicon_vir/-03131_nextgen.htm.