1. Introduction
Many modern engineered artifacts employ sensors and actuators to combine mechanisms that live in and interact with the physical world with controllers that live in the digital world. Increasingly, the design of such artifacts must consider tradeoffs that cross the traditional functional and curricular boundaries. Engineering professionals trained in more than one discipline are becoming very valuable to industry and even academia. Witness the rapid deployment and immense popularity of Mechatronics courses in Mechanical Engineering Departments and Embedded Control courses in Electrical and Computer Engineering Departments.