Abstract
The advancement of semiconductor manufacturing technology makes it practical to place a traditional board-level embedded system on a single chip. The evolvement of system-on-chip (SoC) techniques presents new challenges for integrated circuit designs as well as embedded software and systems. To address these challenges, the Ministry of Education (MOE) of Taiwan has been running the VLSI Circuits and Systems Education Program since 1996. This program adopts a topdown approach by forming six domain-specific, intercollegiate consortia. The Embedded Software (ESW) consortium addresses the challenges of embedded software for SoC systems. This paper first introduces the six-consortium architecture and the organization and programs of ESW. We next describe the embedded software curriculum developed by ESW. This curriculum will later be implemented in most universities and colleges in Taiwan to promote the capabilities of embedded software design and implementations. Finally, we present an execution summary of ESW 2004. © 2005, ACM. All rights reserved.