Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
Imagination Technologies, Microchip Technology and Digilent have announced the Connected MCU Lab, a new course developed through the companies’ respective university programs.
The semester-long curriculum, available to universities worldwide, is designed to be an introductory and first microcontroller (MCU) class taken by undergraduate electronic engineering and computer science students.
It delivers a start to connected embedded systems education – covering MCUs and input/output (I/O), real-time operating system concepts, advanced MIPS processor architecture and cloud connectivity, presented in a jargon-free style.
The Connected MCU Lab takes a hands-on approach, leveraging a Wi-Fi enabled development board, tools, software, and cloud services – everything needed to design IoT solutions.
Lessons are based around the chipKI Wi-FIRE board from Digilent, which uses Microchip’s PIC32MZ MCU incorporating a 32-bit MIPS M-Class CPU from Imagination.
A chipKIT Basic I/O Shield is used for expansion along with a PICkit 3 In-Circuit Debugger from Microchip. Teachers and students have free access to professional software tools including MPLAB X Integrated Development Environment, MPLAB XC32 C compiler, and MPLAB Harmony Software Development Framework from Microchip, as well as Imagination’s cloud technologies.
The Connected MCU Lab curriculum, authored by Dr. Alexander Dean of North Carolina State University, includes presentation slides for each module, student guide, exercises, tests, solutions, and an Instructor’s Guide.
Robert Owen, manager, Worldwide University Programme at Imagination says: “The next generation of embedded system designers and developers need to understand the techniques of connecting embedded systems to the cloud. This is an urgent teaching requirement as many college courses today are still using 8-bit and 16-bit MCUs. The Connected MCU Lab course makes it easy to give the next generation of engineers the skills they need. The 32-bit MIPS CPUs at the heart of Microchip’s popular PIC32 MCUs are ideal for teaching and projects, and the Wi-FIRE board is powerful enough to support very ambitious projects, enabling this course to provide a foundation on which students can grow throughout their degree.”
Eighteen universities across Australia, China, Germany, Israel, Portugal, Russia and the United Kingdom participated in the Connected MCU Lab beta program. Academics are welcome to visit www.imgtec.com/university to register and access the course materials.
