Optional course for the master degree in computer engineering and mandatory course for mechatronic engineering. The purpose of the course is to provide a system-level view of the design of embedded software using a model-driven approach, where designers focus most of their efforts in defining what the software shall do rather than spending time in how the software behaviour is implemented. Several examples will be presented referring to the automotive industry, nevertheless, the methodology is widely adopted also in other industries such as aerospace and biomedical. A reference embedded system for a representative automotive application will be taken as example through the whole class, and different elements will be considered to address the design of such an application. The automotive international standard ISO26262 will be taken as reference for the development process, and the design and validation techniques needed to satisfy the standard will be considered. The concept of model-based software design will then be presented, with particular emphasis on the automatic software generation from behavioural/structural models. The validation process will be detailed considering both model-in-the-loop simulation, and hardware-in-the-loop validation. Finally the concepts related to automatic code generation and integration of the generated code into an hardware platform will be addressed. A short introduction to AUTOSAR standard will also be analyzed.