On the Development of a Model-Based Embedded Systems Design Laboratory Course

In this paper a model-based embedded systems design laboratory course development is presented. The course is an enhancement over an existing embedded systems laboratory course that uses conventional methods along with low-level and high-level programming languages in designing embedded systems. The proposed laboratory course introduces the concepts of model-based design, rapid prototyping, and auto-code generation to junior students of an undergraduate electrical engineering program. The students are exposed to model-based development and design through using MATLAB (R) Simulink (R). The graphical environment of Simulink (R) allows students to easily design and implement embedded software and generate code without worrying about the details of conventional coding issues. Moreover, MATLAB (R) Simulink (R) allows easy autocode generation to be executed on a variety of microcontrollers and FPGAs. The developed lab course and its experiments were implemented for two semesters at least. One of them was during the COVID-19 shutdown and thus the lab was conducted by students at home. The students' feedback is promising and shows that the lab has helped attain more skills needed by the industry in addition to acquiring a new knowledge area that was not covered by the conventional curriculum.