Hands-on oriented curriculum and laboratory development for embedded system design

As embedded systems are getting popular in industrial prod-uct designs, a dedicated teaching laboratory for embedded systems (EST Lab) has been setup for college and graduate students to get familiar with embedded system engineering and researches. In this paper, we present our experiences in embedded system education curriculum and teaching labo-ratory design carried out in the past few years. Accompa-nied by a series of courses with hands-on exercises, students can understand the whole picture of embedded systems in a more systematic way. To give students a comprehensive view of embedded systems, the curriculum includes not only em-bedded hardware architectures and operating systems but also embedded user-level software designs. We select the most popular and available open-source operating system, Linux 2.6, as the primary experimental platform for all lab-oratory practices. In addition to the course design, several research results derived from this laboratory are also pre-sented in this paper.