Teaching Collaborative SoC Engineering with HLS-Based Accelerator Design and Agile System-Level Integration

System-on-Chip Platforms is an advanced course in the computer engineering curriculum at Columbia University that focuses on system-level design principles to expose students, both theoretically and practically, to the main challenges of SoC engineering. The course is divided into two complementary (principles and practice) tracks. In recent years, we have revamped the practice track to give students hands-on experience with SoC design and programming. A key component of this effort is the introduction of object-oriented high-level synthesis, which enables students to acquire the skills necessary to design their own hardware accelerators. In the collaborative final project, students optimize an accelerator and combine it with accelerators designed by other students to create a complete SoC for a target application. The project is based on open-source hardware and can be replicated at other universities.