Treffer: Bridging the Gap between Computer Engineers and Software Developers by Incorporating the PYNQ Platform into a Graduate Course on Embedded System Design Using FPGA.

Today, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) play a very important role in several embedded applications used in the area of defense systems, automotive, bioinformatics, cryptography, consumer electronics and many more. Despite their potential as high-performance computing platforms, they are rarely used within datacenters and other general-purpose computing infrastructure. Due to complicated process flow for developing and implementing applications on an FPGA, application developers without any hardware design background find it difficult to adapt and develop FPGA applications. Xilinx recently introduced the PYNQ platform that enables engineers and programmers to develop embedded systems at a higher abstraction level without having the necessary hardware design background. At Grand Valley State University, we have partnered with Xilinx, a leading manufacturer of FPGAs and a leading provider of programmable platforms to develop a graduate level course for Computer Engineering curriculum to bridge the gap between computer engineers and software developers. This course would allow students from engineering and computer science majors to be able to develop and implement applications on FPGAs using Python programming language and overlays that are similar to software libraries. In this paper, we describe the structure of the course along with the associated topics and laboratory exercises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]