Hardware/Software Co-design is a starting point in Embedded Systems Architecture Education

Embedded Systems Architectures are hard to design, and there is no generally accepted method of doing it. In recent years, this problem has become even harder because of the wide variety of programmable components (FPGA, ASIP, DSP, …). We propose hardware/software codesign as a starting point for teaching the topic. Codesign helps designer-students to think about architecture design in terms of a trade-off between performance and flexibility. Our senior-level undergraduate course in hardware/software codesign includes a hands-on project that requires students to optimize embedded system architecture across the traditional boundaries of hardware and software. We describe a lab series that combines system modeling with refinement on an FPGA board, and that concludes with a class-wide hardware/software codesign contest. The results of the contest clearly illustrate the strengths of ‘systems thinking ’ over ‘component thinking’. 1