CSEE 4840 Embedded System Design Spring 2006

General Information

Class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM in Room 227, Mudd.

Mudd 1235 is the lab, which is filled with Linux workstations and FPGA boards. Registered students will receive accounts on these machines and 24-hour badge access to this room.

Do the labs in groups of three. Project groups should be three students or more.

Staff

Overview

Prerequisites: ELEN E3910 or COMS W3843 or the equivalent. Embedded system architecture and programming. I/O, analog and digital interfacing, and peripherals. Weekly laboratory sessions and term project on design of a microprocessor-based embedded system including at least one custom peripheral. Knowledge of C programming and digital logic required. Lab required.

This is a modernization of ELEN E3940y, Microprocessor Laboratory. Its goal is to introduce you to issues in hardware/software interfacing, practical microprocessor-based system design issues such as bus protocols and device drivers, and practical digital hardware design using modern logic synthesis tools. You will put all of this to use in the lab where you will be given the opportunity to implement, using a combination of C and the VHDL hardware description langauge, a small embedded system.

The focus of the course will be a lab, which will be in two parts. During the first half of the class, teams will each implement the same ``canned'' project designed by the instructor and be given substantial guidance. This project is meant as an opportunity for you to learn the development tools and basic concepts. During the second half, each team will design and implement a comparable project of their own with guidance from the instructor and TAs.

This course is designed to take over the role ELEN 3940 once played in the EE and Computer Engineering curriculum, i.e., as a capstone class in which students will integrate their knowledge of digital logic, programming, and system design to produce a real system. It is intended to complement ELEN 4340, Computer Hardware Design. 4840 will focus more on system-design issues and include a large section on hardware/software integration. Students in 4840 will use processors and peripherals as building blocks. By contrast, students in 4340 have logic gates as building blocks.

Possible second projects include:

• Digital tone control (analog audio in/out, digital DSP operations)
• Digital sound effects processor (e.g., echo, tone shifting)
• Real-time spectrum analyzer (audio in, FFT, VGA display)
• Simple video effects processor (e.g., solarization, inversion)
• Speech synthesizer (analog audio out, hard-wired vocal tract models)
• Digital picture frame (CF to JPEG decoder, VGA out)
• Internet radio (digital audio in via Ethernet, analog audio out)

Prerequisites

ELEN E3910 or COMS W3843 or the equivalent. You must understand digital logic design and C programming. Prior experience with hardware description languages, FPGAs, or embedded processors is not required.

You are strongly encouraged to take COMS W4823, Advanced Programming. In it, you will learn logic design and VHDL coding, both of which are crucial to success in 4840.

Tutorials

• Writing VHDL for RTL Synthesis: A small tutorial with examples of VHDL code.

Schedule

Date	Lecture	Notes	Due
January 17	Embedded Systems
January 19	Low-Level C Programming
January 24	HW/SW Interfaces
January 26	VHDL 1
January 31	VHDL 2
February 2	VHDL 3		Lab 1
February 7	Video
February 9	The OPB		Lab 2
February 14	Video Controller 1
February 16	Video Controller 2		Lab 3
February 21	Serial Communication 1		Proposal
February 23	Serial Communication 2		Lab 4
February 28	VHDL coding hints
March 2	(no lecture)		Lab 5
March 7	(no lecture)
March 9	(no lecture)
March 14	Spring Break
March 16	Spring Break
March 21	Memory		Lab 6
March 23	Processors, FPGAs, and ASICs		Design
March 28	Hardware/software tradeoffs
March 30	The PS/2 Keyboard
April 4	Sprite Graphics
April 6
April 11
April 13			75% Demo
April 18
April 20
April 25
April 27
May 9	Final Presentations, reports due		Project

The Project

You'll perform a design-it-yourself project in the second half of the class. There are five deliverables for the project:

1. A short project proposal describing in broad terms what you plan to build and how you plan to build it
2. A detailed project design describing in detail the architecture of your project, both hardware and software. This should include block diagrams, memory maps, lists of registers: everything someone else would need to understand your design. You should have done some preliminary implementation work by this point to validate your design.
3. An early demo of your project. It should be roughly 75% working and be showing signs of life. This is to make sure you are making reasonable forward progress.
4. A presentation on your project to the class
5. A final project report

Project groups should be three students or more.

The Project Report

This is a critical part of the project and will be a substantial fraction of the grade.

Include the following sections:

1. An overview of your project: a revised version of your project proposal.
2. The detailed project design documents: a revised version of the project design.
3. A section listing who did what and what lessons you learned and advice for future projects
4. Complete listings of every file you wrote for the project. Include C source, VHDL source, and things such as .mhs files. Don't include any file that was generated automatically.

Include all of this in a single .pdf file (don't print it out) and email it to me on the due date.

Also create a .tar.gz file (see the online documentation for the `tar' program to see how to create such a file. Briefly, create a file called `myfile' with the names of all the files you want to include in the archive and run tar zcf project.tar.gz `cat myfiles` to create the archive.) that just includes the files necessary to build your project, such as I did for the labs. Also email this to me by the due date.

Projects

DVoiceR: (CS) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Neil Sarkar    Adegoke Adediran    Stephanie Maryon

popi: (SE) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Yashket Gupta    Javier Coca    Adam Lehenbauer    Alexander Robertson

SNAKE: (CS) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Wei-Chung Hsu    Chiali Liang    Xunzhou Zhang    David Lau

VGLR: (SE) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Dawit Bekele    Alison Leonard    Han Cheng Liang    Edward Mung

Hera: (SE) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    David Lariviere    Deum Jik Park    Bryan Gwin    Michael Verbalis

Fortune-Teller: (CS) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Leo Gertsenshteyn    Russel Santillanes    Kathryn Hagan

Internet-Radio: (CS) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Yingjian Gu    Qiutao Yu    Chun-Chuen Li    Imran Quyyum

spycam: (CS) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Amit Mehta    Kshitij Misra    Ken Tang

Picture-Frame: (CS) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Alan Rabinowitz    Mothler Dalexis    Rafael Guevara

Web-Server: (SE) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Franklin Ma    Howard Wang    Victor Wang    William Wong

VoIP: (SE) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Ari Klein    George Sirois    Ashish Sharma    Sambuddho Chakravarty

Xilinx Documentation

• XST User Guide: Describes the XST synthesis system and how to write HDL code
• Development System Reference Guide: Describes the various tools that come after synthesis, e.g., place-and-route, technology mapping, and BitGen
• Libraries Guide: Describes built-in library components such as I/O pads and other primitives.
• Constraints Guide: Describes, among many other things, the .ucf file format for specifying pin locations.
• Embedded System Tools Guide: describes platgen; libgen; and .mhs, .mpd, and .mss files
• OPB tutorial: How to interface to the Microblaze bus
• User Core Templates Reference Guide: How to write a new peripheral
• OPB UART Lite: The serial interface used with the Microblaze
• Processor IP User Guide: Describes the On-Chip Peripheral Bus (OPB) and peripherals, both hardware and software
• Xilinx Device Drivers Documentation: Describes, among others, the UART Lite
• MicroBlaze Processor Reference Guide: Describes the 32-bit softcore processor, its bus, instructions, and ABI

OPB documents

• On-Chip Peripheral Bus Architecture Specifications: a complete description of the bus by IBM, its inventor

XSB Manual and Peripheral Datasheets

• XESS XSB-300E User's manual: schematics and pinouts of the board
• Xilinx Spartan-IIE 1.8V FPGA family datasheet
• Xilinx Spartan-IIE architecture datasheet
• Xilinx Spartan-IIE DC and Switching Characteristics datasheet
• Xilinx XC9500XL high-performance CPLD family datasheet
• Cypress CY22393 Three-PLL Serial-Programmable Flash-Programmable Clock Generator
• Atmel AT49LV040 512K X 8 flash memory
• Toshiba TC55V16256J 256K X 16 SRAM
• Samsung K4S281632 8M X 16 SDRAM
• Micron synchronous DRAM. These chips are not on the board, but the documentation is much more detailed than that for the Samsung part
• TI THS1230 12-bit, 30 MSPS Low-Power Analog-to-digital Converter
• TI THS8133 Triple 10-bit, 80 MSPS Video D/A Converter
• AKM AK4565 Low Power 20 bit audio CODEC
• ASIX AX88796L Ethernet controller
• Philips SAA7114H NTSC/PAL/SECAM video decoder
• Cypress CY7C68001 USB 2.0 controller

Links

• Embedded System Design from Summer 2005
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2005
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2004
• Web resources for Vahid and Givargis
• VHDL examples
• Other VHDL resources
• Ken Shepard's EE 4340 class (2003)
• Ken Shepard's EE 4340 class (1999)

Class Policies