Abstract
Teaching embedded system design is challenging, as the subject
covers a wide range of aspects, and also involves skills
that students do not learn from a text book. As a result,
hands-on projects, with varying degree of complexity, are
the most common approach in existing courses. Traditionally,
the projects are limited to uni-processor systems, and
do not address the complications involved in parallelising
applications and mapping them to multi-processor systems.
In this paper, we describe a two-year-old embedded systems
design course given at Eindhoven University of Technology.
In the course, groups of four students are faced with the
problem of putting an embedded JPEG decoder on the market
within one semester. The starting point is a decoder
written in sequential C and an embedded multi-processor
system, running on an FPGA. We describe the ideas and
organisation of the course, and give examples of what challenges
the students, as well as the instructors, are faced with.
We exemplify results and give suggestions to those wishing
to teach embedded multi-processor programming elsewhere.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the Workshop on Embedded Systems Education (WESE) 2008, October 23rd, 2008, Atlanta, Georgia |
| Pages | 1-9 |
| Publication status | Published - 2008 |