On Teaching Embedded Systems Design to Electrical Engineering Students

This paper describes the some relevant issues encountered by the authors during the development and teaching of an embedded system (ES) course meant for third year Electrical Engineering Bachelor students at the Faculty of Information Technology and Systems, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. Given that we were addressing Electrical Engineering students, we deviated from the “traditional” way to teach ES design, i.e., focus on embedded software only. Consequently, we decided to cover theoretical as well as practical ES design aspects both from hardware and software prospective. We organized the course as a combination of lectures and a lab assignment. The main topics discussed in the lectures include embedded systems characteristics and requirements, unified modeling language (UML), instruction set architectures, compilation techniques, power-aware design, hardware accelerators, embedded system networks, and design methodologies. The current lab assignment encompasses the design of a spectrum analyzer for audio analogue signals that displays the frequency spectrum on an LCD display. The lab is meant to give the students an opportunity to solve a real life ES design problem by exercising hardware/software co-design in simulated company conditions. On Teaching Embedded Systems Design to Electrical Engineering Students Stephan Wong, Sorin Cotofana Computer Engineering Laboratory, Electrical Engineering Department, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands {Stephan, Sorin}@CE.ET.TUDelft.NL