Integration of high-level synthesis to the courses on reconfigurable digital systems

Digital system design constitutes an essential part of engineering education. Many universities worldwide target the respective courses to field-programmable gate arrays and the relevant design flow. Recent programmable systems-on-chip integrating a processor-based computing system and a programmable logic rely on quite a different design philosophy constituting a new challenge for future engineers. These new trends have to be certainly reflected in the pedagogical activity so that the current students would, in a few years, satisfy the growing industry requirements. In this paper we analyze the new design flow and explore in detail one particular part of it: a possibility of directly generating hardware modules from software specifications through high-level synthesis. The reported teaching method is to be applied in two tightly collaborating Universities: University of Aveiro in Portugal and Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia.