Reconfigurable Computing System: A Project-Based Course for Graduate Students

摘要

With a reduction of energy budgets and increasing aggregation of different applications, reconfigurable computing system is becoming a promising platform for future system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs. This paper presents a project-based course on reconfigurable computing systems. With the aid of an education platform, students learn to design their own mixed-grained reconfigurable architectures and implement a cryptographic algorithm. Combining both fine-grained Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs), the course provides students an integrated view of reconfigurable computing system following the up-to-date scientific development in this area. Also, students gain practical hands-on experience of designing reconfigurable computing system using hardware-software co-design methodology. More than fifty students participate a comprehensive survey after the course and twelve faculty members of the similar research interests also appraise the course. Both the survey feedback and the course assessment confirms that the objectives of the course are well achieved.