Teaching SoC design in a project-oriented course based on robotics

The fast growing complexity and short time-to-market of embedded systems designs, besides the great increase in capacity of today's chips, are mobilizing the industry towards to the development of system-on-chip (SoC) solutions and platform based designs. However, as the complexity of such systems grows, the problems associated with the integration of the IP-cores necessary to form the system arise as a major problem in the design flow. In a case study approach, based on robotics, teaching students the synthesis design flow in a rapid prototyping platform for SoC, provides them the understanding and skills they need to perform such function in their subsequent employment. This paper describes a design flow, for a project-oriented course, to help designers to gain productivity by using the SoC approach on FPGA, while avoiding integration problems by introducing automatic tools. This methodology has been used in undergraduate and graduate digital system design classes.