Expected Background

To be successful in this course, you should have background in the areas of computer organization and architecture, digital logic and hardware, and VHDL/Verilog design. The specified prerequisite courses have been selected accordingly.

If you do not feel particularly strong in HDL coding, this is a good opportunity to get better, but you should review the fundamentals. There will be lectures on how best to use HDL for design, but not the syntax or constructs of the language. That you will find in the books.

References below are to the following textbooks:

HVZ

Computer Organization and Embedded Systems, Hamacher, Vranesic, Zaky, Manjikian, 6th ed.

BV

Fundamentals of Digital Logic with Verilog Design, Brown and Vranesic

BV

Fundamentals of Digital Logic with VHDL Design, Brown and Vranesic

More specifically, these topics should be reviewed:

CAD Flow

BV, we'll discuss it more in the course.

Logic Gates, Combinational blocks

BV, gates, multiplexers, decoders, encoders

Storage

BV, registers, flip flops

Synchronous Logic

BV, counters, state machines

Assembly Language

HVZ Chapter 2

I/O

HVZ Chapters 3, 7, 8.4, particularly accessing via memory mapping, interrupts, buses, interface circuits, DMA

Memory System

HVZ Chapter 8, how to use memories

Numbers and Arithmetic

BV, HVZ Chapter 9

Pipelining

HVZ Chapter 6, not so much for making processors fast, but using it to make your logic faster

Embedded Systems

HVZ Chapter 10, 11.

Peripherals

HVZ Chapters 7, 10 have some stuff that may be relevant to things you might want to do.

HDL Design

BV, constructs in Appendix A are sufficient to do lots of good designs. In particular, you should be able to code state machines, registers and the various basic combinational blocks such as multiplexers, encoders, decoders, and arithmetic functions.

C Programming

All programming of the MicroBlaze processor is done in C or C++.

Makefiles and Scripting

Familiarity with these will be extremely useful. They are used a lot in modern hardware design.

Debugging

You should be good at debugging or learn very quickly how to do this! Learning a good simulator, such as ModelSim, for HDL debugging and using gdb for debugging software is essential. Don't even bother trying to synthesize without having done simulation.