Course Description

This course focuses on practical applications of advanced digital design concepts. Topics will be related to design with embedded processors and application specific architectures. The course is focused around significant projects to be implemented on FPGAs, however, many of the design concepts will also applicable to ASIC designs.

Lectures will cover topics such as design flows, design with HDLs, good design practices, timing, clock domains, high-speed data links, Intellectual Property (IP) reuse, and FPGA technologies. Some lectures will also be devoted to issues in the lab, design reviews of some projects and two in-class tests. (There will be no final exam)

Labs and projects will be implemented on an FPGA design board. The goal of the project is to provide a real design opportunity using state-of-the-art tools and technology.

The learning from the project is about how to implement complex designs, specifically in the approaches for large digital systems encompassing a lot of gates and a lot of software.

• At the hardware level, this will call upon knowledge of computer architecture, logic design, and circuit design.

• The software component of these projects will not have the benefit of a common operating system that abstracts the hardware from the students. Students will need to apply their knowledge of operating systems, compilers, algorithms and networking at a low-level where they interact directly with the hardware. This is often applicable to embedded system designs.

• Depending on their choice of design projects, students will have to call upon the algorithms they have learned in areas such as control systems, digital signal processing, multimedia, networking, and data structures as integral parts of the overall architecture of their system. They will have to produce both hardware and software that work in concert to create the overall system.

• Effort will be required to learn how to push these modern design automation tools to be a productive part of the overall design process.

Anyone can use tools if they work all the time by pushing the right buttons. Understanding what the tools are trying to do means that when things inevitably break, students will know where to look to find the problem, and how to get around it.

The reality of being a good designer is knowing how to debug, whether it is your own design, or the tools.