CSEE 4840 Embedded System Design Spring 2015

General Information

Class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:40 - 3:55 PM in 602 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 20	Introduction: Embedded Systems
Thu Jan 22	SystemVerilog
Tue Jan 27	Snow Day
Thu Jan 29	Video
Tue Feb 3	Memory
Thu Feb 5	Line drawing example		Lab 1
Tue Feb 10	Networking, USB, and Threads
Thu Feb 12
Tue Feb 17	Hardware/Software Interfaces
Thu Feb 19	The Avalon Bus		Lab 2
Tue Feb 24	Device Drivers		Proposal
Thu Feb 26	Qsys and IP Core Integration
Tue Mar 3	Sprite Graphics
Thu Mar 5	Processors, FPGAs, and ASICs
Tue Mar 10
Thu Mar 12			Lab 3
Mar 16-20	Spring Break
Tue Mar 24
Thu Mar 26			Design
Tue Mar 31
Thu Apr 2			Milestone 1
Tue Apr 7
Thu Apr 9
Tue Apr 14			Milestone 2
Thu Apr 16
Tue Apr 21
Thu Apr 23
Tue Apr 28			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:

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) 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

BlazePPS: Blaze Packet Processing System (Stephen) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Christopher Campbell, Sheng Qian, Valeh Valiollahpour Amiri, and Yuanpei Zhang

EmbeddedSpikeSorter: Spike sorter: classifying brain activity (Lianne) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Zhewei Jiang and Jamis Johnson

Eskimo-Farm: Side-Scrolling Shoot-em-up (Richard) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Shruti Ramesh, Prachi Shukla, and Miguel Yanez

Flappy-Bird: That Game on an FPGA (Richard) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files YenHsi Lin, Junhui Zhang, Gaoyuan Zhang, and Wei Zheng

HFT2: High-speed trading algorithm (Stephen) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Nathan Abrams, Alexander Gazman, and Hang Guan

Labyrinth: Dijkstra's Shortest Path in Hardware (Stephen) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Michelle Andrade Valente da Silva, Ariel Faria, Utkarsh Gupta, and Veton Saliu

PLazeR: Planar Laser Rangefinder (Lianne) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Xingzhou He, Peiqian Li, MinhTrang Nguyen, and Robert Ying

PSHFT: Pocket-Sized High Frequency Trader (Stephen) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files DavidNaveenDh Arthur, Gabriel Blanco Cabassa, Brian Bourn, and Suchith Vasudevan

RSAB: RSA Cryptographic Accelerator (Kuangya) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Adam Incera, Jaykar Nayeck, Emilia Pakulski, and Noah Stebbins

Smile: Genetic Algorithm on an FPGA (Kaiwei) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Jian Jiao, Jihua Li, Wenbei Yu, and Yini Zhou

TYRION: Singular Value Decomposition Accelerator (Kuangya) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files E. Jubb and Ruchir Khaitan

Tank: Battle City Game (Richard) Proposal Design Han Cui and James Thompson

battlecity: Battle City Game Report Files Li Qi

breakout: Simple Brick Breaker Game (Kuangya) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Wanding Li, Mingrui Liu, Fengyi Song, and Junchao Zhang

racing: Car Racing Game (Lianne) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Mingxin Huo, Yifan Li, Jing Shi, and Siwei Su

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 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