Toward An Interactive Environment For Embedded Systems Design
Fadi Obeidat, Ruba Alkhasawneh, Jerry H. Tucker, Robert H. Klenke · 2020
In this paper, we propose building an interactive environment for embedded systems design using Nexys2 board from Digilent where a MicroBlaze soft-core processor and a VHDL monitor interface have been configured on the Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA.This infrastructure allows an easy integration of hardware/software modules and a flexible monitoring for application's signals-of-interest, which in turn, enables students enrolled in an embedded systems class to interact directly with software and hardware components via monitor interface allowing an interactive debugging for the system-under-development.Moreover, as an implementation of problem based learning in engineering education, the project itself is a practical implementation of an embedded system that aims to walkthrough basic skills needed in embedded systems design.