Instructors in the area of embedded systems face an ongoing struggle to incorporate current design and development techniques into their laboratory exercises. In addition to the difficulty of keeping pace with technological advances in the field, a significant investment is often made in the design tools and development boards with the expectation that these costs will be amortized over five years or more. Fortunately, a number of microcontroller manufacturers have adopted the IEEE 1149.1 Standard Test Access Port, more commonly known as a JTAG interface, to facilitate programming and debugging their processors. Software development tools have also begun to converge into a collection of open-source point tools, such as a compiler and assembler, that are managed by an open-source integrated development environment. As a result, instructors can easily provide a sophisticated development environment for embedded systems using tools and techniques very similar to those used in industry, supporting a variety of microcontrollers for less than the cost of a typical textbook. We have used such a development environment in a microcontroller systems design course for second-year students in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, using ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers. Our students are able to program the microcontrollers in both C and assembly language, or a combination of the two. We use the GNU debugger, gdb, with a commercial high-speed USB-to-JTAG interface and a low-cost development board. Students performed all of the essential development tasks, writing their programs, compiling them, and debugging their code, from within the Eclipse integrated development environment.
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