Skiing the embedded systems mountain

Abstract

UCLA teaches students how to master the steep slopes of the embedded systems mountain. The EE201A graduate course connects high-level design specification to embedded implementation. There is a long-standing and wide culture gap between system designers that create those abstract specifications and the system architects that need to implement them. In industry, the culture gap has separated software from hardware teams, and platform creators from platform users. In an embedded context, where these are very tightly connected, this leads to large inefficiencies both in design time and design results. Our course takes students to both sides of the gap and lets them look at this problem from different perspectives. For a given application, it teaches how to select target architectures, tools, and design methods. The course covers a stepwise systematic design process. It includes specification, transformation, and refinement of an application. Specifications enable systematic and structured expression of an application. Transformations rework specifications into ones that are a better match for a given target architecture. Refinements lower the abstraction level toward the target architecture. The embedded systems mountain is traversed in two directions. A vertical refinement axis covers elements such as power-memory-reduction methods or fixed-point refinement. A horizontal exploration axis covers various architecture alternatives including application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC), domain-specific processors, digital signal processors (DSP), embedded cores, programmable processors, and system-on-chip (SOC). During the course, the students also go through an extensive design project to apply the methods learned in this course. A typical embedded application is used to drive the project. In this paper it is illustrated using an embedded version of an image encoder, more specifically a JPEG encoder. Several commercial tools, design environments, and platforms have been used as alternative implementation targets for this application.