Embedded system hardware design course track for CS students

Qualified software engineers are often in charge of system architecture design, system software design and many hardware-related issues, especially for embedded systems. Nowadays, embedded systems are equipped with fully-functional operating systems, multi-media applications, communication protocols, and so on. Since the portion of software is getting larger and larger than hardware, it is natural that software engineers are more promising in management of system-level design and integration. To supply qualified software engineers, the School of Computer Science and Engineering in Seoul National University offers a series of hardware design courses on embedded systems. They consist of FPGA design, board-level hardware design, microprocessor-based embedded system and system software design. Actual prototype implementations are mandatory in each course. The track ends up with a two-semester design project. The course track produces 20 to 30 CS-background students with intensive experience of hardware design and implementation every year. This paper introduces the outline of the course track and results.