Everyday microcontrollers
Sunday, December 28th, 2008
Commercial Product
Think of a car, with an advanced fuel system, anti locking system, electronic windows, electronic seats, cabin control, telemetry, and entrainment system to name a few. Ten years ago, only higher end models of car had these “luxuries”, while the lower end had manual heating/cooling control, levers to move your mirrors and seats.
Most of control of these has mainly been replaced with microcontrollers and associated devices (i.e. motors, solenoids etc). In earlier versions of Apple’s iPod prior to moving to an Apple branded chip, the heart and soul of the iPod was Portal Players PP5xxx system-on-chip microcontroller.
It contained 2 ARM cores and a swag of peripheral connections some being:
· LCD Controller
· USB controller
· Firewire controller
· Photo LCD controller
· IDE controller
Due to the extensive peripheral controllers on the chip, this allowed the design of the iPod to be the size and have the elegance we all know and love them to be.
Education of Microcontrollers
At the University of New South Wales(UNSW) early in 2001 we realized that, computer and electrical engineers are required to involve in the design of complex computer-based embedded systems to address highly-specialised and specific applications in aerospace, telecommunications, power-production, manufacturing, defence, and electronics industries.
Applications include consumer electronics (CD and DVD players, televisions, stereos, and gaming devices), advanced microprocessors, peripheral equipment, systems for portable, desktop, and client/server computing, and communications devices (cellular phones, pagers, personal digital assistants). They also include distributed computing environments (local- and wide-area networks, wireless networks, intranets, Internet) and embedded computer systems (such as aircraft, spacecraft, and automobile control systems, in which computers are embedded to perform various functions).
Unfortunately, the education and training of embedded systems in the Australian universities, generally, does not reflect trends in embedded systems design. Typical content in an introductory course in embedded systems and microprocessor design is similar to that of technical institutes, using an 8-bit processor to teach programming in assembly language, implementing trivial interfacing to the outside world on a prototyping board, and performing simple control and measurement experiments. In the middle of 2001, at the University of New South Wales we went through process of review, design, and delivery of a course in modern embedded systems.
The product was an international collaborative teaching project involving the University of New South Wales (Australia), Manchester University, and Imperial College, London University (United Kingdom). This project, being the first of its kind anywhere in the world, provides a learning environment that replicates the current industrial practice in embedded systems design in an easy and comprehensible setting, an environment where the processor, dedicated coprocessors, and software are all integrated to create a functional system such as used in sophisticated electronic devices, including mobile phones, web phones, televisions, digital cameras, and personal digital assistants.
Such collaborations are important in both reducing development costs in developing up-to-date, and increasingly sophisticated, courses and in addressing pedagogical issues that are common between computer and electrical engineering programs in all academic institutions. To assist students’ learning experience, the course is supported with purpose built state-of-the-art programmable hardware and software development platforms, carefully planned laboratory experiments, lecture notes, weekly online quizzes, tutorials, and a companion CD-ROM as a learning tool.