The 1st Workshop on Reconfigurable
Computing Education The
Workshop: Motivations DRAFT Having created the fastest growing segment of the microelectronics
market, FPGAs have become mainstream already years ago in all kinds of
embedded systems. More recently FPGAs and other reconfigurable
platforms are rapidly moving into practically every application area,
such as automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, chemistry, molecular
biology, physics, astrophysics, high performance computing,
supercomputing, and other areas. Including reconfigurable platforms in the design of embedded systems
as well as embedded real-time systems requires skills at least from
control, computer science, and electronics. Currently it requires to
involve experts from different backgrounds, with dissenting points of
view, not only for test and verification of such designs, if at all
possible, being very expensive and delaying significantly the
introduction of products. Rapidly growing complexity and pervasiveness of multi-paradigm
devices including also major allotments of reconfigurable modules leads
to a productivity crisis of major proportions. On the other hand
reconfigurable computing is an efficient approach to cope with
the accelerating VLSI design crisis. While the economic importance of
FPGAs and other reconfigurable platforms is widely acknowledged,
and the strategic dimension of reconfigurable computing has not been
appreciateduntil recently, academia has dramatically failed to
pay sufficient attention to the
education of a community of high-quality system designers and
configware programmers using such platforms. We need to counter
the current trend, where specialization is the target of education
systems by going toward interdisciplinary CS-related curricula. What ingredients do we need for such curricula? Embedded system
design insolves not only
hardware-software co-design. What is really needed is
the much more interdisciplinary approach of
hardware-configware-software co-design, not only as a design practice,
but also as part of CS curricula. Although configware engineering
is a discipline of its own, fundamentally different from software
engineering, and, a configware industry is already existing
and growing, it is ignored by our curricula. Modern FPGAs have all
three paradigms on board of the same VLSI chip: hardwired accelerators,
memory banks, microprocessors, and FPGAs, and we need software and
configware to program the same chip. To cope with the clash of
cultures we need interdisciplinary
curricula merging all these different backgrounds in a systematic way.
We need innovative lectures and lab courses supporting the integration
of reconfigurable computing for progressive curricula. The workshop
intends to provide a forum for presenting new educational
approaches and for an exchange of ideas.
RC education 2006
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and collection of material
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Each of these application domains has only a limited view of
computing and takes it more as a mere technique than as a science on
its own.
Dramatic consequences are, that it makes it very difficult to
bridge the cultural and practical gaps.
Given this fragmentation, it can be rather hard to investigate, since
there are so many different actors and departments involved.
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A special session on Embedded Systems
Education
The goal is to bring researchers, educators, and
industrial representatives together to share design, research, and
education experiences in embedded systems.
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diverse cultural background of the particular application domain.
unifying the discipline once it has become clear that fundamental
problems are shared across different application domains.
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It
is widely recognized that the embedded system domain is a
multidisciplinary one, requiring a large variety of skills from
control and signal processing theory, electronics, computer
engineering and science, telecommunication, etc., as well as
application domain knowledge. This has motivated a recent but ever
growing interest in the question of educating specialists in this
domain and this has also been recognized as a particularly difficult
problem. This first workshop on the subject aims to bring
researchers, educators, and industrial representatives together to
assess needs and share design, research, and education experiences in
embedded systems.
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Each of these application domains has only a limited view of
computing and takes it more as a mere technique than as a science on
its own.
Dramatic consequences are, that it makes it very difficult to
bridge the cultural and practical gaps.
Given this fragmentation, it can be rather hard to investigate, since
there are so many different actors and departments involved.