ARM Cortex M4F-based, Microcontroller-based, and Laboratory-oriented Course Development in Higher Education

Abstract

Abstract ARM (Advanced RISC Machines) processors are frequently found in modern consumer electronics products such as smartphones and tablets. The author has been teaching two courses on embedded system software and microcontroller architecture for each Fall and Spring semester since Fall of 2016 and 2017, respectively. These two courses have been revised for more concentration on an ARM architecture and its applications to equip students to create various ARM applications. The microcontroller architecture course covers Verilog HDL, MIPS architecture, and ARM architecture. Next, students take the following embedded system software course. In this course, a MSP430 architecture is covered, and the ARM Cortex M4F processor and its high level C programming techniques using Tivaware and TI RTOS (Real-time Operating System) are covered. For the term project, students have a chance to build their own embedded system applications using an ARM Cortex M4F processor or MSP430x5 series microcontrollers. In order to enhance the laboratory components, a custom education board, BH EDU board, was designed and fabricated. This auxiliary education board has switches, a Bar LED, and a buzzer on the boards as well as headers for external components such as a LCD module and a keypad. Example robots using these educational boards are presented. The enrollment data as well as embedded system course assessment data from 2016 to 2018 is presented in the paper.