
	CSEE 4840 Embedded System Design Spring 2014

General Information

Class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:40 - 3:55 PM in 602 Hamilton Hall.

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 pairs. Project groups should be three students or more.

Staff

Name	Email	Office hours	Location
Prof. Stephen A. Edwards	sedwards@cs.columbia.edu		462 CSB or 1235 Mudd
Prof. David Lariviere	dal2103@columbia.edu	F 10-12	1235 Mudd
Amrita Mazumdar	am3210@columbia.edu	M, W 1:30-2:30	1235 Mudd
Qiushi Ding	qd2119@columbia.edu	T, Th 11-12	1235 Mudd
Jian Lu	jl3946@columbia.edu	M, W 3-4	1235 Mudd

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.

The goal of this class 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 SystemVerilog hardware description langauge, a small embedded system.

This is a lab course done in two parts. During the first part of the class, each student will implement the same "canned" designs designed by the instructor and be given substantial guidance. These are meant as an opportunity for you to learn the development tools and basic concepts. In the second part of the class, you will divide up into teams and each will design and implement a comparable project of their own with guidance from the instructor and TAs.

This course is a capstone 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 focuses more on system-design issues and include a large section on hardware/software integration. Students in 4840 will use gates, processors, peripherals, software, and operating systems as building blocks.

Prerequisites

CSEE 3827, Fundamentals of Computer Systems or the equivalent. You must understand digital logic design. Prior experience with hardware description languages, FPGAs, or embedded processors is not required.

COMS 3157, Advanced Programming or the equivalent. Specifically, C programming experience. While 4840 will teach you advanced aspects of embedded C programming, you need to come in with significant C experience.

COMS W4823, Advanced Digital Logic Design. While not a formal prerequisite, you are strongly encouraged to take it. In it, you will learn advanced logic design and HDL coding, both of which are crucial to success in 4840.

Schedule

Date	Lecture	Due
Jan 21	Introduction: Embedded Systems
Jan 23	SystemVerilog
Jan 28	"
Jan 30	"
Feb 4	Video
Feb 6	Memory	Lab 1
Feb 11	Networking, USB, and Threads
Feb 13	Snow Day; no lecture
Feb 18
Feb 20	Hardware/Software Interfaces	Lab 2
Feb 25	The Avalon Bus	Proposal
Feb 27	Device Drivers
Mar 4	"
Mar 6	Qsys and IP Core Integration
Mar 11	Sprite Graphics
Mar 13	Processors, FPGAs, and ASICs	Lab 3
Mar 17-21	Spring Break
Mar 25
Mar 27		Design
Apr 1	Guest Lecture: David Dembeck of Stone Ridge Technology
Apr 3		Milestone 1
Apr 8	Guest Lecture: John Lockwood of AlgoLogic
Apr 10
Apr 15		Milestone 2
Apr 17
Apr 22
Apr 24
Apr 29		Milestone 3
May 14	Final Project, Presentations

The Project

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

A short project proposal describing in broad terms what you plan to build and how you plan to build it
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.
Your design document should also a plan of what you intend to complete by each of the three milestones.
Three milestones that you set for yourself: think of 25%, 50%, and 75% completion
A presentation on your project to the class
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:

An overview of your project: a revised version of your project proposal.
The detailed project design documents: a revised version of the project design.
A section listing who did what and what lessons you learned and advice for future projects
Complete listings of every file you wrote for the project. Include C source, SystemVerilog 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

10Gbs: 10 GB/s Packet Processing (DL)

Grading	30% Labs
	10% Milestone 1
	15% Milestone 2
	20% Milestone 3
	25% Final Report and presentation
Late Policy	Zero credit for anything handed in after it is due without explicit approval of the instructor.
Collaboration Policy	Work in pairs on the labs. You may consult others, but do not copy files or data. You may collaborate with anybody on the project, but must cite sources if you use code.

General Information

Staff

Overview

Prerequisites

Schedule

The Project

The Project Report

Projects

Tutorials

Resources

Other References

Recommended Texts

Links

Class Policies