CSEE 4840 Embedded System Design Spring 2026

General Information

Class meets Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:10 - 2:25 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 two or three. Project groups should be 3-5 students; aim for 4.

Staff

Overview

Prerequisites: COMS W3827 and COMS W3157 or the equivalent. CSEE W4823 suggested. 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 class will 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 implement a small embedded system using a combination of C and the SystemVerilog hardware description language.

This is a lab course done in two parts. During the first part of the class, you will implement "canned" designs supplied by the instructor and be given substantial guidance. These are meant to teach you the use of the development tools. In the second part of the class, you will divide up into teams and each will design and implement a project of your own with guidance from the instructor and TAs.

This course is a capstone in which students 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, and addresses lower-level issues than COMS 6868 Embedded Scalable Platforms or EECS E4764 Internet of Things. CSEE 4840 focuses 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, it is strongly encouraged. 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
Wed Jan 21	Introduction: Embedded Systems
Mon Jan 26	SystemVerilog
Wed Jan 28	"
Mon Feb 2	"
Wed Feb 4	Memory
Mon Feb 9	"
Wed Feb 11	Networking, USB, and Threads
Fri Feb 13			Lab 1 Files
Mon Feb 16	Video
Wed Feb 18	Hardware/Software Interfaces
Mon Feb 23	Debugging
Wed Feb 25	The Avalon Bus
Mon Mar 2	Device Drivers
Wed Mar 4	IP Cores and Platform Designer
Fri Mar 6			Lab 2 Files 16 GB SD Card Image
Mon Mar 9
Wed Mar 11
Fri Mar 13			Proposal
Mar 16-20	Spring Break
Mon Mar 23
Wed Mar 25	Sprite Graphics
Mon Mar 30	Audio Waveforms
Wed Apr 1	(No lectures this day going forward) Line drawing example Processors, FPGAs, and ASICs (1/2) Processors, FPGAs, and ASICs (2/2)
Fri Apr 3			Lab 3 Hardware files Software FIles Kernel Module Env.
Mon Apr 6
Wed Apr 8
Mon Apr 13
Wed Apr 15
Fri Apr 17			Design document
Mon Apr 20	Design reviews
Wed Apr 22	Design reviews
Mon Apr 27
Wed Apr 29
Mon May 4
Wed May 13	Final Project Presentations

The Project

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

1. A short project proposal describing what you plan to build and how you plan to build it. This is to communicate your plans to the professor and TAs so that we can advise you on how to proceed.
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, and an analysis of resource usage: everything someone else would need to implement your design. You should have done some preliminary implementation work by this point to validate your design.
   
3. A design review during which you discuss and defend the choices you've made in its design and implementation to that point and discuss how you will complete the project. This is to reduce the possibility of questions like "why didn't you do it this much better way?" during your final presentation.
4. A presentation and demo of your project.
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:

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, 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 `myfiles' 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.

Sample Project: Wireframe

• Wireframe Project Proposal An example of a complete proposal

Tutorial: Tile-based VGA Graphics

• VGA TIle Graphics on an FPGA: A Tutorial A worked-through example showing how to generate tile-based graphics

• Source files for VGA TIle Graphics on an FPGA

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 2025
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2024
• CSEE 4840 from Spring 2023
• 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