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

Abstract

As embedded systems are getting popular in industrial product 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 laboratory design carried out in the past few years. Accompanied 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 embedded 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 laboratory practices. In addition to the course design, several research results derived from this laboratory are also presented in this paper.