Teaching hardware software codesign to software engineers

Abstract FPGAs open completely new possibilities in system design, allowing to move the border between hard- and software. Our department has taken this trend in account, offering a Hardware Software Co-Design course. In order to cover both hardware and software aspects of system design and to keep the effort in reasonable margins, we provided a semi automated development framework. Within this framework, the students have to solve a specic problem, where the decision, which part is solved in software and which part in hardware has to be performed by the students themselves. Being initially skeptic concerning this concept maybe all students use the same partitioning at the end of the course we were pleasantly surprised: Some students solved the problem mainly in software, others implemented the required functionality primarily in hardware. At the end of the course all solutions were discussed, so that the students could recognize the advantages but also the drawbacks of their own solution