Hardware software co-design is becoming increasingly important tothe embedded systems industry. It will soon be fundamental to digitalsystems design. As such, students in electrical and computer engineeringand in computer science should be introduced to hardware-softwareco-design early in their undergraduate education. We are designinglaboratory modules which introduce concepts of hardware-softwareco-design in an undergraduate's first course on microcontrollers anddigital systems design. Students use design automation tools to developFPGA-based hardware for use with an 8051-microcontroller and use commonsoftware development tools to develop microcontroller software in C orassembly language. Co-simulation of hardware and software is enabledusing a simulation model of the 8051 that we developed. Preliminaryresults are encouraging. Students who take the lab perform better in theassociated lecture class than those who do not take the lab and appearto develop a greater appreciation for digital systems design. We believesuch laboratories will be a common component of computer engineeringclasses in the future
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