Computer Organization and Design
Computer Organization and Design
Experiences with the Blackfin architecture in an embedded systems lab
WCAE '06 Proceedings of the 2006 workshop on Computer architecture education: held in conjunction with the 33rd International Symposium on Computer Architecture
An experimental laboratory environment for teaching embedded hardware systems
WCAE '07 Proceedings of the 2007 workshop on Computer architecture education
Nexos: a next generation embedded systems laboratory
ACM SIGBED Review
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In the course of a major curriculum change at California Polytechnic State University, the embedded processing course was redesigned. During this process, the course had the opportunity to purchase new hardware. Analog Device's Black-fin processor was chosen based mostly on cost, but also on performance, development environment, and documentation. We first present our goals in the class. We then give an overview of the Blackfin architecture and how the Blackfin fits in with many of our goals. We then present the implementation of an expansion board developed to interface with Blackfin's EZ-KIT Lite board. We present our experiences with this setup in the hopes that others who might be thinking of a similar curricular change can learn from our successes and failures. We outline the strengths and weaknesses of the Blackfin architecture as an educational platform, followed by a discussion of our experiences and a presentation of the support materials we developed to accompany the course, including lecture material and laboratories. Finally, we discuss our future directions for our uses with the board.