Design based tutorials for System-on-Chip teachings

Abstract

Universities are recently updating their digital design education offerings to include the recent System-on-Chip (SoC) design approaches. This paper presents two design based tutorials aimed at providing a smooth transition in the current traditional education for universities. The design tutorials are implemented on the Altera DE2 board. The first tutorial provides an implementation of a basic microprocessor model and is designed for junior and senior Electrical and Computer Engineering students. The second tutorial is an implementation of Least Frequently Used algorithm and is designed for sophomore students. The assessment of these tutorials shows an increase in students' knowledge on FPGA, embedded systems, SoC, and software-hardware co-design. Further, some students showed a great interest in using FPGA boards in their senior design project, while others expressed interest in taking a full 2–3 hour laboratory course to increase their knowledge on SoC. The design database and tutorial documents are available for public and can be downloaded from the University's website.