Embedded systems platform-based design from teaching to industry or vice-versa

Abstract

Even though embedded systems have been designed for many decades in a variety of industrial domains, their economic importance has grown exponentially as electronic components have made their way into everyday-use devices. The increasing number of applications requires an improved productivity which cannot be afforded without new methods and tools. In this context platform-based design, which comes from hardware systems development, has an essential role helping designing of such heterogeneous systems from requirements and modeling to final qualification tests. One of the multiple development environments which resemble the platform-based design targeting embedded systems is the graphical platform, LabVIEW. The virtual instrumentation can modify the entire development cycle, reshaping it from "V" to a "Y" life-cycle through automated code generation, and further, as an articulation point into a platform based design paradigm, to a "T" one. At the same time, the environment has effects in teaching the multidisciplinary domain of embedded systems by giving the opportunity to switch from lecture-experimentation to a laboratory-lecture order into a hands-on approach. ©2010 IEEE.