CSEE 4840 Embedded System Design Spring 2016

General Information

Class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:40 - 3:55 PM in 717 Hamilton.

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

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	Notes	Due
Tue Jan 19	Introduction: Embedded Systems
Thu Jan 21	SystemVerilog
Tue Jan 26	"
Thu Jan 28	Memory
Tue Feb 2	Video
Thu Feb 4	Line drawing example
Tue Feb 9	Networking, USB, and Threads
Thu Feb 11			Lab 1
Tue Feb 16	Hardware/Software Interfaces
Thu Feb 18	The Avalon Bus
Tue Feb 23	Device Drivers		Proposal
Thu Feb 25	Qsys and IP Core Integration		Lab 2
Tue Mar 1	Sprite Graphics
Thu Mar 3	Processors, FPGAs, and ASICs
Tue Mar 8	Debugging
Thu Mar 10	Audio Waveforms		Lab 3
Mar 14-18	Spring Break
Tue Mar 22
Thu Mar 24			Design
Tue Mar 29
Thu Mar 31			Milestone 1
Tue Apr 5
Thu Apr 7
Tue Apr 12			Milestone 2
Thu Apr 14
Tue Apr 19
Thu Apr 21
Tue Apr 26			Milestone 3
Tue Apr 28
May 12	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:

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.
   Your design document should also a plan of what you intend to complete by each of the three milestones.
3. Three milestones that you set for yourself: think of 25%, 50%, and 75% completion
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, 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).

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.

Projects

Bombermen: Two-player Bomberman Gmame (AI) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Hanyi Du, Murui Li, Wantong Li, and Yichun Deng

Boxing: Game (SE) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Jiaqi Gua

CU-Racing: Game (JN) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Chandan Kanungo, Raghavendra Sirigeri Hanumesh, Robert Kettlewell, and Shikhar Kwatra

Cellular: Cellular Automata Simulator (AI) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files James Olsen, Jeffrey Tao, Priscilla Wang, Robert Viramontes, and Serena Shah-Simpson

Chip8: Game Language Emulator (SE) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Ashley Kling, David Watkins, Gabrielle Taylor, and Levi Oliver

Crops: Tower Defense Game (SE) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Ao Li, Chenli Yuan, Dingyu Yao, and Liang Zhang

DGEsc: Dungeon Escape Game (AI) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Shengjia Zhang, Xiaoqing Yong, Yi Wu, and Yuxin Yang

FOREX: High-speed foreign exchange trading (DA) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Graham Gobieski, Kevin Kwan, Shang Liu, and Ziyi Zhu

FPGgram: Image rendering (JN) Proposal Design Report Presentation Diana Valverde-Paniagua and Tonye Brown

Gestures: Gesture Recognition (JN) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Avinash Nair, Jerry Barona, and Manushree Gangwar

JARVIS: Adaptive Noise Cancellation (JN) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Ashwin Karthik Tamilselvan, Gikku Stephen Geephilip, Richa Glenn Netto, and Rishikanth Chandrasekaran

JPEG: JPEG Compression Engine (DA) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Nan Zhao, Song Wang, Xinyi Chang, and Yuxiang Chen

Jumpers: Plaform game (AI) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Bernardo De Almeida Abreu, Henrique Pizzol Grando, Lucas Ikenaga Barros, and Tomas Mantelato

Switch-ON: Network Switch Demonstrator (DA) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Ayush Jain, Donovan Chan, and Shivam Choudhary

Tetris: Game (DA) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Benjie Tong, Weipeng Dang, Yanbo Zou, and Yiran Tao

Whac-a-mole: Game (SE) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Aditya Bagri, Astha Agrawal, Georgios Charitos, and Jai Sharma

nes-pacs: NES Emulator (SE) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Akira Baruah, Chaiwen Chou, Philip Schiffrin, and Sean Liu

My favorites

Tutorials

• Installing Quartus and Related Tools: How to install the development tools on a virtual machine so you can do development on your own computer.
• How Linux Boots on the SoCKit Board: How the boards and server are configured to boot Linux from our server. Useful if booting fails or if you want to reproduce our setup elsewhere.
• Configuring Linux: Kernels and all that: How I compiled the various Linux kernels and root filesystems that we used for the various labs.

Resources

• Terasic's SoCKit Page: documentation on the SoCKit board (manual, schematics, etc.), demo projects
• SoCKit Board at RocketBoards.org: downloads and documentation, largely about Linux on the SoCKit
• Altera's Quartus Documentation: Manuals for the Quartus II system (FPGA development tools)
• Altera's Cyclone V Devices: Detailed information about the main chip on the SoCKit board, both the FPGA and ARM processor system

Other References

• Ueda et al. TV Game System Having Reduced Memory Needs. United States Patent #4,824,106. April 25, 1989.
• Datasheet for the sprite-based Texas Instruments TMS9918 Video Display Processor.

Recommended Texts

Mark Zwolinski. Digital System Design with SystemVerilog. Prentice-Hall, 2010. SystemVerilog is relatively new, so there are not too many books out there for it. This is one of the better ones. It focuses on the sythesizable subset of the language and also discusses test benches. Examples, etc., are available from the Author's web site..

James K. Peckol. Embedded Systems: A Contemporary Design Tool. Wiley, 2008. Many embedded system books are too idiosyncratic or incomplete for my taste, but this one does a nice job covering everything from digital circuit design to interprocess communication in real-time operating systems. It only discusses the Verilog language and only in an appendix.

Links

• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2015
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2014
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2013
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2012
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2011
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2010
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2009
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2008
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2007
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2006
• Embedded System Design from Summer 2005
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2005
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2004

Class Policies