Automatic Code Generation: Facilitating New Teaching Opportunities in Engineering Education

Abstract

Model-Based Design in industry relies heavily on automatic code generation technology. The need to obtain code for different configurations such as rapid prototyping, hardware-in-the-loop simulation, and processor-in-the-loop simulation introduces extensive code generation from high-level models and to be cost effective and competitive requires the automation of this code generation. This paper shows some of the issues that embedded systems engineers have to negotiate as a consequence of this. It indicates that there is a shift in required skills from the algorithmic to the architectural level. As such, automatic code generation technology provides an opportunity in academia to better prepare students to be successful in the field of embedded control system design by including such architectural aspects in the curriculum, while shifting focus of algorithm design from creation to inspection.