Teaching
CCLI: Novel Instruction Material Development for Embedded
System Education in Undergraduate Curriculum
Funding Source: NSF,
$150,000, 3/1/2007 - 2/28/2010
Industrial Support: Xilinx University
Program
PI: Dr. Gang Quan Co-PI: Dr. John Bowles
Introduction
The primary focus of this three-year project is the development of laboratory materials for undergraduate students in embedded system design. The primary goal in developing these materials is to provide the students with extensive hands-on opportunities to enhance their knowledge and understanding of advanced concepts and principles in designing current and next-generation embedded systems using FPGA technology. FPGA design has a much short design cycle, lower cost, and a smoother learning curve. In addition, FPGA devices are programmable and reprogrammable, which makes them reusable throughout the lab practices and excellent devices to test and investigate different design alternatives, which makes them much more suitable to build Intellectual Property (IP) based application-specific systems in an undergraduate embedded system design course. FPGA devices are also becoming increasingly popular in industrial embedded system designs where they are often used to develop a piece of “core” functionality which can then be sold as an IP component. Therefore, learning to use the tools and design processes for FPGA based embedded systems will provide students with skills and experiences that can be readily applied when they begin to compete in the global labor force. We are developing the instructional materials based on the exemplary materials provided by Xilinx University Program (XUP). Our previous experiences have shown that the original material cannot be effectively used in undergraduate embedded system design course due to two major drawbacks: (1) the fundamental concepts are usually buried among a plethora of technical details in the commercial software and hardware environment; (2) the original material is inadequate and insufficient in terms of scope and topic in undergraduate embedded system design education. It is therefore our goal to develop a series of systematic and comprehensive labs and support materials that are suitable for an undergraduate embedded system design education.
Objective
To
develop lab materials for embedded system design that can provide our
undergraduate students with extensive hands-on opportunities to enhance their
knowledge and understandings of the advanced concepts and principles in
designing current and the next-generation embedded systems.
The Lab Platform
|
Hardware
Platform: XUPV5-LX110T
|
Hardware
Platform: Xilinx Virtex-II
Pro Development Board
|
|
Software Platform: Xilinx ISE, Xilinx EDK, Xilinx ChipScope
|
|
•
•
An
integrated hardware and software design environment •
Reusable
and flexible •
Short
design cycle and low design cost •
Smooth
learning curve • A great lab platform for exploring advanced topics such as the multi core related design |
|
The Course Contents
|
Groups |
Core concepts |
|
The
principle of FPGA design
and embedded system design |
FGPA
design, VHDL programming, embedded
system design flow, design
automation |
|
Embedded
system hardware
development |
Processor
architecture, Intellectual Property(IP),
system-on-chip, Platform- based
design, memory and I/O devices |
|
Embedded
system software
development |
Cross-platform
development, embedded software
design flow, software design optimization,
hardware/software interfacing,
polling and interrupt |
|
Real-time
operating system
supports |
Process/thread,
multitasking, real-time scheduling,
inter process communication (mutex/semaphore/message
queue), real-time
operating system |
|
Embedded
system debug |
Software
debugging techniques, hardware debug,
hardware/software co-debug |
|
Advanced
embedded system
designs |
Multi-core
system, dynamic frequency scaling,
power management, network on chip |
The Lecture Slides:
Introduction, VHDL, FPGA, Xilinx EDK, Processor
basics, Memory, Hardware/software
interface, IO devices, Software, Operating system,
Debug
Note: If you need the original Powerpoint files, please contact
Dr. Gang Quan at gang.quan@fiu.edu for
details. Part of the slides are from Xilinx XUP program and also from course
slides for “Embedded System Design : A Unified Hardware/Software Introduction”
by Frank Vahid and Tony Givargis at http://esd.cs.ucr.edu.
The Lab Manuals
|
Lab
Manuals |
Hardware/Software
Platforms |
|
XUPV5-LX110T/Xilinx ISE
10.1 |
|
|
XUP Vertex-II Pro/Xilinx
ISe 10.1 |
|
|
XUP Vertex-II Pro/Xilinx
ISE 9.2 |
Note: There are more lab projects
available. Please contact Dr. Gang Quan at gang.quan@fiu.edu
for details. If you want to get the source files for the solutions of the
projects, please also contact Dr. Gang Quan directly.
Acknowledgement
This project is supported by NSF under grant DUE-1002436 and Xilinx University Program (XUP).