Abstract
The very nature of universities makes them unique environments for research and teaching. Although both activities constantly borrow from each other, a deeper level of interaction is not always achieved for several reasons. This paper presents a successful experience on conducting an undergraduate course on embedded systems, based on strong interaction with related research activities previously conducted by the authors. Known for being everywhere, embedded systems are constantly expanding in both complexity and volume production. In addition, heterogeneous systems are becoming prevalent in modern applications, standing as an additional difficulty to students in this area. In this context, this paper presents experiences in teaching embedded systems using a project-based learning pedagogical approach, with strong emphasis on mobile robotic applications previously developed by MSc and PhD students. As a result, it has been observed that undergraduate students have the opportunity to build a strong background and feel better prepared to face the challenges to be found in their future professional activities. © 2014 Vanderlei Bonato et al.

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Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are able to provide hardware accelerators still maintaining the required programmability. However, the advantages of using FPGAs still depend on the expertise of developers and their knowledge of Hardware Description Languages (HDLs). Although High-level Synthesis (HLS) tools have been developed in order to minimize this problem, they commonly present solutions considered many times inefficient when compared to the ones achieved by a specialized hardware designer. Domain-specific languages (DSLs) can provide alternative solutions to program FPGAs. They can provide higher abstraction levels than HDLs and they may allow the programmer to tune implementations whenever HLS tools are unable to generate efficient designs. In this paper we compare a DSL, named LALP (Language for Aggressive Loop Pipelining), with two typical HLS approaches and show the experimental results achieved in each case. The results show that the use of LALP provides superior performance than the achieved by the HLS tools in most cases.

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