Arm Education Media Launches System-on-Chip Design Online Courses

Arm Education Media’s brand-new system-on-chip design online courses are Arm-technology-based reference resources for students and practicing engineers.

The demand for qualified System-on-Chip (SoC) specialists is growing. Modern day SoC design techniques have evolved into a highly efficient IP-based design process, thanks to the emergence of a sophisticated IP ecosystem.

SoC technology allows a sophisticated system with a microprocessor alongside various peripherals to be built into a single chip with customized functionalities. Arm is a leader in provision of the underlying technologies for SoC designs, most notably via its Cortex series processors. Arm-based SoCs are ubiquitous in high-performance mobile devices such as cell phones and tablets. In addition, the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) is creating a surge of demand for devices for which power consumption, security and cost are key considerations.

To help students and practicing engineers learn how to design and implement a modern SoC using industry-standard Arm-based IP and professional software tools, Arm Education Media is launching two new online courses: Introduction to System-on-Chip Design and Advanced System-on-Chip Design.

These online courses provide individuals, educators and corporate training departments with the tools required to succeed in this increasingly important subject area. Each course contains 10-12 modules that cover lecture slides, quizzes, lab videos, project code and solutions.

Introduction to SoC Design Online Course

IoT promises billions of devices endowed with processing, memory and communication capabilities. These processing nodes will be, in effect, simple SoCs.  They will need to be inexpensive, and able to operate under stringent performance, power and area constraints.

The Introduction to SoC Design online course focuses on building SoCs around ultra-low-power Arm Cortex-M0 DesignStart processors, which are perfectly suited for IoT needs. Using FPGAs as prototyping platforms, this course explores a typical SoC development process: from creating high-level functional specifications to design, implementation and testing on real FPGA hardware using standard hardware description and software programming languages.

Advanced System-on-Chip Design Online Course

The revolution in mobile computing has been driven by the low power and integrated performance available in modern SoC designs. This course takes students through a typical advanced SoC design process: from creating high-level functional specifications to design, implementation and testing on real hardware using standard hardware description and software programming languages. 

The course harnesses Arm Cortex-A based platform FPGAs as convenient tools for designing and prototyping typical high end SoCs capable of running commodity operating systems. Taking a hands-on approach covering both theory and practice, the course includes details for designing and developing an image processing demo application using the Arm-based Zynq system.

How to Buy or Subscribe

Individuals: purchase or subscribe to the Introduction course and the Advanced course

Institutional or corporate subscriptions: Register with Arm Education Media for more information

Introduction to System-on-Chip Design Syllabus

1. Introduction to Arm-based System-on-Chip Design
2. The Arm Cortex-M0 Processor Architecture: Part 1
3. The Arm Cortex-M0 Processor Architecture: Part 2
4. AMBA 3 AHB-Lite Bus Architecture
5. AHB SRAM Memory Controller
6. AHB VGA Peripheral
7. AHB UART Peripheral
8. Timer, GPIO and 7-Segment Display Peripherals
9. Interrupt Mechanism
10. Programming an SoC Using C Language
11. Arm CMSIS and Software Drivers
12. Application Programming Interface and Final Application

Pre-requisites and learning outcomes

Advanced System-on-Chip Design Syllabus

1. Introduction to Arm-based System-on-Chip Design
2. Arm and Arm Processors
3. Arm DS-5 Development Studio
4. ARMv7-A/R ISA Overview
5. Arm Cortex-A9 Processor
6. AMBA AXI4 Bus Architecture
7. AXI4-Lite GPIO Peripheral and DDR Memory Controller
8. AXI UART and AXI4-Stream Peripherals
9. AXI4-Stream with VGA Output Peripheral
10. AXI4-Stream with HDMI Input Peripheral
11. Final Application: Image Processing

Pre-requisites and learning outcomes