Teaching Embedded Systems Design – An International Collaborative Project

Abstract

Abstract-This paper describes the process of review, design, and delivery of a course in modern embedded systems, an international collaborative teaching project involving the University of New South Wales (Australia), Manchester University, and Imperial College, London University (United Kingdom). This project, being the first of its kind anywhere in the world, provides a learning environment that replicates the current industrial practice in embedded systems design in an easy and comprehensible setting, an environment where the processor, dedicated coprocessors, and software are all integrated to create a functional system such as used in sophisticated electronic devices, including mobile phones, Web phones, televisions, digital cameras, and personal digital assistants. Such collaborations are important in both reducing development costs in developing up-to-date, and increasingly sophisticated, courses and in addressing pedagogical issues that are common between computer and electrical engineering programs in all academic institutions. To assist students' learning experience, the course is supported with purpose built state-of-the-art programmable hardware and software development platforms, carefully planned laboratory experiments, lecture notes, weekly online quizzes, tutorials, and a companion CD-ROM as a learning tool. Since the introduction of this complete package, students' satisfaction, assessment results, and skills obtained through evaluation and assessment methods have improved markedly.Index Terms-Embedded systems teaching, international collaboration in teaching, microprocessor design teaching, programmable hardware development board.

Simulation Oriented Layer of Embedded Software Architecture for Rapid Development of Custom Embedded Systems Virtual Simulators Used in Didactics

“…Software modeling for embedded systems using such virtual platforms can reduce the time to market and allow for performing extensive unit tests [31] that could be troublesome in real-device [32] design. For didactic purposes in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, such virtual platforms are invaluable at any teaching level [33][34][35].…”