Transparent Connectivity for Embedded System Design

Embedded system design is a topic of interest to multidisciplinary fields including electrical engineering and computer science. In order to correctly focus on the correct aspects of embedded system design, be it hardware for electrical engineering students, or software for computer science students, seamless connectivity between the hardware and software aspects needs to be provided. One approach to provide students from both fields with practical experience is to develop a transparent bridge between the hardware and software layers of the embedded system design. In this paper we demonstrate a universal serial bus/serial peripheral interface (USB/SPI) transparent bridge to interface an embedded system to a personal computer. The bridge consists of a hardware module that transmits the embedded system data through SPI to a PC using USB. A device driver for the USB/SPI bridge provides a straightforward application programming interface to the embedded system. The bridge can aide students studying embedded system design and students studying computer software development to collaborate on design projects.