CSEE 4840 Embedded System Design Spring 2023

General Information

Class meets Fridays, 1:10 - 3:40 PM in 451 CSB.

Mudd 1235 is the lab, which is filled with Linux workstations. 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.

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 l 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
Fri Jan 20	Introduction: Embedded Systems
Fri Jan 27	SystemVerilog
Fri Feb 3	Memory
Fri Feb 10	Networking, USB, and Threads Video
Thu Feb 16	(none)		Lab 1 Files
Fri Feb 17	Hardware/Software Interfaces
Fri Feb 24	The Avalon Bus		Proposal
Thu Mar 2	(none)		Lab 2 Files 16 GB SD Card Image
Fri Mar 3	Device Drivers
Fri Mar 10	Qsys and IP Core Integration Debugging
Mar 13-17	Spring Break
Thu Mar 23	(none)		Lab 3 Hardware files Software FIles Kernel Module Env.
Fri Mar 24	Sprite Graphics Line drawing example Processors, FPGAs, and ASICs (1/2) Processors, FPGAs, and ASICs (2/2) Audio Waveforms
Thu Mar 30	(none)		Design document
Fri Mar 31
Fri Apr 7	Design reviews
Fri Apr 14
Fri Apr 21
Fri Apr 28
May 11	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 teams should be three students or more.

The Design Document

This document should explain what you're going to build and how you're going to build it, but does not not need to include code. A corrected version of this document that reflects what you actually built should end up in your final project report.

• A Sample Design Document

Include the following things:

1. A block diagram
2. A description of the algorithms your project will implement
3. Resource budgets, e.g., for on-chip memory
4. A detailed plan for the hardware/software interface: every register and bit

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

My favorites

Resources

• Terasic's DE1-SoC Page: documentation on the DE1-SoC board (manual, schematics, etc.), demo projects
• Intel's Quartus Prime User Guides: Manuals for the Quartus Prime system (FPGA development tools)
• Intel Cyclone V SoC FPGAs: Detailed information about the main chip (a Cyclone V SE) on the DE1-SoC board

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.

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 2022
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2020
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2019
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2016
• 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