CSEE 4840 Embedded System Design Spring 2005

Highlights

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General Information

Class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM in Room 209 Havemeyer. This is a change from our initial room.

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.

Tutorials

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

Schedule

Date	Lecture	Notes	Due
January 18	Embedded Systems
January 20	Low-Level C Programming
January 25	HW/SW Interfaces
January 27	Processors, FPGAs, and ASICs
February 1	Serial Communication
February 3	(no lecture)		Lab 1
February 8	VHDL 1
February 10	VHDL 2		Lab 2
February 15	VHDL 3
February 17	Video		Lab 3
February 22	Video Controller 1		Proposal
February 24	Video Controller 2		Lab 4
March 1	Memory
March 3	The OPB		Lab 5 Midterm out
March 8	(no lecture)
March 10	(no lecture)		Midterm Due
March 15	Spring Break
March 17	Spring Break
March 22
March 24
March 29			Lab 6
March 31			Design
April 5
April 7	Guest Lecture
April 12
April 14			75% Demo
April 19
April 21
April 26
April 28
May 10	Final Presentations		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

Notator: Human-to-Music converter (Marcio) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    James Rishe    Andrew Melkonian    Narashiman Chakravarthy

Shifter: Automatic Shifting for SAE Racer (Stephen) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Ronald Alleyne    Wade Brzozowski    Joseph Carey

Pitch: Real-time Pitch Detector (Marcio) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Koohee Lee    Gary Lo    Guy Sivan

Speech: Speech Synthesizer (Marcio) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Aisha Ahmad    Akshay Deoras    Girish Gupta

Scrabble: Super Scrabble Timer (Stephen) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Nathan Hale    Gaurav Singal    Andrew DiMichele    Vishal Govil    Hubert Lin

Scorched: Scorched Earth XESS (Marcio) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Michael Sumulong    Jeremy Chou    Dennis Chua

Radio: Internet radio broadcaster (Stephen) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Avraham Shinnar    Benjamin Dweck    Oliver Irwin    Sean White

RTProc: Real-Time microprocessor (Stephen) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Julio Rios    Sharmila Gupta    Emil Nunez

USBMedia: USB Media Center with a Remote Control (Marcio) Proposal    Final Report    Philip Li    Pamela Lee    Yanjie Ma    Alexander Kuo    Neeraj Bhatia    Michael Chuen

MAYD: MAYD Ain't Yet Developed (Marcio) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Surag Mungekar    Vladislav Adzic    George Yeboah    Nabeel Daulah

PicFrame: Digital Picture Frame (Stephen) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Samuel Toepke    Nenad Uzunovic

Telephone: Voice-over-IP SIP Telephone (Stephen) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    Rajkumar Bakhru    Colin Gilboy    Sam Jenning

Guitar: Guitar Effect Synthesizer (Marcio) Proposal    Design    Final Report    Project Files    JunHao Ip    Jason Cardillo    Chih-Chieh Lin

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

• 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)

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