Boost your career with real-time systems expertise. Master real-time theory, methods of analysis and design, and put them into practice.

3.8

stars

41 ratings

Sam Siewert

4,253 already enrolled

Offered By

Real-Time Embedded Systems SpecializationUniversity of Colorado Boulder

What you will learn

Rate Monotonic theory and policies
Methods of Rate Monontoic analysis
Real-time system design techniques
Engineering principles for allocating functionality and services to hardware, firmware or software implementation

Skills you will gain

About this Specialization

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The Real-Time Embedded Systems specialization is a series of four course taking you from a beginning practitioner, to a more advanced real-time system analyst and designer. Knowledge and experience gained on hard to master topics such as predictable response services, when to allocate requirements to hardware or software, as well as mission critical design will enhance your engineering talent. You will gain experience building a simple, but real, system project with real-time challenges, that will boost your confidence. The hands-on, at home, project hardware is affordable, widely available, and quick-time-to market methods leverage Linux real-time extensions, open source RTOS (Real-Time Operating System), as well as tried and true cyclic executives. After you complete all four courses in the series, you can consider yourself an intermediate to more advanced real-time system practitioner. This knowledge is invaluable for medical, aerospace, transportation, energy, digital entertainment, telecommunications, and other exciting embedded career options. The series stresses hands-on practice and assessment of your learning progress, not only based on knowledge acquisition, but by teaching you to put theory into practice and how to evaluate design options and make optimal choices. The unique final project allows you to see real-time challenges with your eyes, to debug interactively, and build a simple at-home detection, tracking and synchronization system.

Applied Learning Project

Project work includes a series of real-time processing and concurrency exercises along with analysis and design in the first two courses. The third course provides experience with mission critical components like error correction code memory, flash file systems, and redundant hardware. In the final course, you put all of the practice together into your own design to build a real-time system that you can test at home. The project covers topics including: concurrency, Linux kernel modules, machine vision, co-processors, and correct function with timing constraints. You will use specific real-time extensions to Linux and compare advantages and disadvantages of Linux to more traditional RTOS, cyclic executive, and FPGA options. The experience you gain can be used to launch additional exploration of hybrid FPGA systems (e.g. Altera and Xilinx), GP-GPU (e.g. NVIDIA), and multi-core scale-up (e.g. ARM A and R-Series) as well as MCU scale-down solutions (ARM M-Series microprocessors).

Shareable Certificate

Earn a Certificate upon completion

100% online courses

Start instantly and learn at your own schedule.

Flexible Schedule

Set and maintain flexible deadlines.

Intermediate Level

Approximately 5 months to complete

Suggested pace of 12 hours/week

English

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Shareable Certificate

Earn a Certificate upon completion

100% online courses

Start instantly and learn at your own schedule.

Flexible Schedule

Set and maintain flexible deadlines.

Intermediate Level

Approximately 5 months to complete

Suggested pace of 12 hours/week

English

Could your company benefit from training employees on in-demand skills?

Try Coursera for Business

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How the Specialization Works

Take Courses

A Coursera Specialization is a series of courses that helps you master a skill. To begin, enroll in the Specialization directly, or review its courses and choose the one you'd like to start with. When you subscribe to a course that is part of a Specialization, you’re automatically subscribed to the full Specialization. It’s okay to complete just one course — you can pause your learning or end your subscription at any time. Visit your learner dashboard to track your course enrollments and your progress.

Hands-on Project

Every Specialization includes a hands-on project. You'll need to successfully finish the project(s) to complete the Specialization and earn your certificate. If the Specialization includes a separate course for the hands-on project, you'll need to finish each of the other courses before you can start it.

Earn a Certificate

When you finish every course and complete the hands-on project, you'll earn a Certificate that you can share with prospective employers and your professional network.

There are 4 Courses in this Specialization

Course1

Course 1

Real-Time Embedded Systems Concepts and Practices

3.7

stars

48 ratings

This course can also be taken for academic credit as ECEA 5315, part of CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree.

Course Description: In this course, students will design and build a microprocessor-based embedded system application using a real-time operating system or RT POSIX extensions with Embedded Linux. The course focus is on the process as well as fundamentals of integrating microprocessor-based embedded system elements for digital command and control of typical embedded hardware systems. Lab Description: The course requires the student to install embedded Linux on the Raspberry Pi ARM A-Series System-on-Chip processor. This course must be completed using a Raspberry Pi as an embedded system (headless) not a PC running Linux. You will however find Linux as a useful host development system or Windows with an SSH terminal access tool such as Putty, MobaXterm, or equivalent.

Course2

Course 2

Real-Time Embedded Systems Theory and Analysis

4.5

stars

11 ratings

This course can also be taken for academic credit as ECEA 5316, part of CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree.

This course provides an in-depth and full mathematical derivation and review of models for scheduling policies and feasibility determination by hand and with rate monotonic tools along with comparison to actual performance for real-time scheduled threads running on a native Linux system. By the end of this course the learner will be able to full derive the fixed priority rate monotonic least upper bound for feasibility as well as justifying the rate monotonic policy and will be able to compare to dynamic priority scheduling including earliest deadline first and least laxity policies. At the end of this course learners will be able to fully derive and explain the math model for the rate monotonic least upper bound as well as performing timing diagram analysis for fixed and dynamic priority software services. Tools to provide analysis will be learned (Cheddar) to automate timing analysis and to compare to actual performance. Specific objectives include: ● Rate monotonic theory (complete math models) ● Differences between fixed priority rate monotonic policy and dynamic priority earliest deadline first and least laxity policies ● Scheduling theory and practice writing code for multi-frequency executives, priority preemptive RTOS services, and real-time threaded services on traditional operating systems (Linux) ● Building a simple Linux multi-service system using POSIX real-time extensions on Raspberry Pi 3b using sequencing and methods to log and verify agreement between theory and practice ● Timing diagram generation and analysis using Cheddar

Course3

Course 3

Real-Time Mission-Critical Systems Design

4.6

stars

10 ratings

This course can also be taken for academic credit as ECEA 5317, part of CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree.

Upon completion of this course the learner will know the difference between systems you can bet your life on (mission critical) and those which provide predictable response and quality of service (reliable). This will be achieved not only by study of design methods and patterns for mission critical systems, but also through implementation of soft real-time systems and comparison to hard real-time. Methods of verification to determine ability to meet mission critical as well as soft real-time requirements will be learned so that the learner can properly assess risk, reliability and impact of failure in real-time systems. At the end of this course learners will be able to apply an architectural style (cyclic executive, RTOS, or embedded Linux) to more detailed design of a mission critical system, a soft real-time system, or a mixed hard and soft real-time system, including: ● Thorough understanding of hardware/software device interfaces and resource view for hardware abstraction layers (HAL, BSP) ● Design trade-offs with different real-time hardware architectures including single core, multi-core, hybrid-FPGA, GP-GPU, and DSP systems, with emphasis on multi-core ● Mission critical embedded systems architecture and key design elements ● Fault tolerant processing, memory, and I/O concepts

Course4

Course 4

Real-Time Project for Embedded Systems

This course can also be taken for academic credit as ECEA 5318, part of CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree.

The final course emphasizes hands-on building of an application using real-time machine vision and multiple real-time services to synchronize the internal state of Linux with an external clock via observation. Compare actual performance to theoretical and analysis to determine scheduling jitter and to mitigate any accumulation of latency. The verification of the final project will include comparison of system timestamp logs with a large set of images which can be encoded into a video. The final report will be peer reviewed and the captured frames and video uploaded for scripted assessment. Course Learning Outcomes: ● Outcome 1: Decompose a problem and set of basic real-time requirements into software modules and Linux POSIX real-time threads ● Outcome 2: Analyze services in terms of C (execution time), T (request period), and D (deadlines for completion) to establish feasibility and margin for meeting requirements ● Outcome 3: Design and construct a solution for a native Linux system equipped with a webcam to verify and demonstrate system synchronization using machine vision processing

Instructor

Sam Siewert

Associate Professor Adjunct

Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering

14,300 Learners

4 Courses

Offered by

University of Colorado Boulder

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the refund policy?
If you subscribed, you get a 7-day free trial during which you can cancel at no penalty. After that, we don’t give refunds, but you can cancel your subscription at any time. See our full refund policy.
Can I just enroll in a single course?
Yes! To get started, click the course card that interests you and enroll. You can enroll and complete the course to earn a shareable certificate, or you can audit it to view the course materials for free. When you subscribe to a course that is part of a Specialization, you’re automatically subscribed to the full Specialization. Visit your learner dashboard to track your progress.
Is financial aid available?
Yes. In select learning programs, you can apply for financial aid or a scholarship if you can’t afford the enrollment fee. If fin aid or scholarship is available for your learning program selection, you’ll find a link to apply on the description page.
Can I take the course for free?
When you enroll in the course, you get access to all of the courses in the Specialization, and you earn a certificate when you complete the work. If you only want to read and view the course content, you can audit the course for free. If you cannot afford the fee, you can apply for financial aid.
Is this course really 100% online? Do I need to attend any classes in person?
This course is completely online, so there’s no need to show up to a classroom in person. You can access your lectures, readings and assignments anytime and anywhere via the web or your mobile device.
How long does it take to complete the Specialization?
The series includes 4 courses that have 4 to 5 10 to 15 hour modules, so between 200 to 300 hours to complete, depending upon prior experience with operating systems, embedded hardware and C programming.
What background knowledge is necessary?
C programming is required, C++ is helpful, but optional, and some knowledge of concurrent processing and software interfaces to hardware is useful.
Do I need to take the courses in a specific order?
The first course should be taken before the second. The third course can be taken alone or at any time (mission critical design and analysis) and the fourth course should only be taken after the first two have been completed.
Will I earn university credit for completing the Specialization?
This is possible.
What will I be able to do upon completing the Specialization?
Enter the field of real-time embedded software and/or firmware design and development, with a working knowledge and appreciation of hardware design principles that support these systems.

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Real-Time Embedded Systems Specialization

What you will learn

Skills you will gain

About this Specialization

Applied Learning Project