Course Description

This course is about practical applications of advanced digital design concepts. Lecture topics will be related to design with embedded processors, FPGAs and ASICs. The practical aspect of the course is focused around significant projects to be implemented on FPGAs.

Lectures will begin with an introduction to the tools, the design methodology supported by the tools and an introduction to the key components that are used. Other topics cover architecture design, design flows, design with HDLs, good design practices, timing, clock domains, high-speed data links, ASIC and FPGA technologies. Some lectures will also be devoted to issues with projects as required.

The goal of the project is to provide a real design opportunity using state-of-the-art tools and technology.

To get familiarity with the tools and the hardware you will start with some canned tutorials. This only gets you started and you will be expected to do a lot of digging on your own, as you would do in any real design position.

What you gain from doing the project is practical experience on managing and implementing complex designs, specifically in the approaches for large digital systems encompassing a lot of gates and a lot of software.

More specifically:

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

• The software you write will not have the benefit of a common operating system that hides the hardware from you. You will need to use your understanding of operating systems, compilers, algorithms and networking at the levels where they interact directly with the hardware. This is the world of embedded systems.

• At the systems level, you will have to call upon the algorithms you have learned in areas such as control systems, digital signal processing, multimedia, networking, and data structures as integral parts of the overall architecture of your system. You will have to make the hardware work with the software and vice versa.

• You will need to do a significant amount of research on your own such as, for example, to learn how chips work by reading data sheets, to learn about various standards, such as how VGA video works, or to figure out how to load Linux, if you need an operating system. Fortunately, the web makes this significantly easier.

• Much effort will be spent wrestling with modern design automation tools and getting them to be a productive part of your overall design process. Anyone can use tools if they work all the time by pushing the right buttons. No modern CAD tool is free from bugs, i.e., they have lots of unadvertised features and a major challenge is to work with or around those features. CAD tools are in constant evolution (new version every 6 months) so set your expectations accordingly. This is where it helps to understand what the tools are trying to do so that when things inevitably break, you will know where to look to find the problem, and how to get around it. This is the real world and not a sanitized teaching environment. You should expect these problems and learn to deal with them. If this will frustrate you, then this is not the course or career for you.

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