CSEE 4840 Embedded System Design


	CSEE 4840 Embedded System Design Spring 2004

Home

Highlights

Don't miss this year's highlights

General Information

Class meets Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00AM-12:15PM, 627 Mudd (this has changed)

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.

Why we needed a bigger classroom

Staff

name	email	office hours	location
Prof. Stephen Edwards	sedwards@cs.columbia.edu	T, Th 1-2	462 CSB
Cristian Soviani	soviani@cs.columbia.edu	W 2-4	1235 Mudd (Office 472 CSB)
Josh Mackler	jrm267@columbia.edu	T 12:40-2:40	1235 Mudd

Please begin email subject lines with CSEE 4840

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.

Schedule

Date	Lecture	Reading	Due
January 20	Embedded Systems	Ch. 1, 11
January 22	HW/SW Interfaces	Ch. 3, 6
January 27
January 29	Processors, FPGAs, and ASICs	Ch. 3, 10
February 3	Hardware/software tradeoffs	Ch. 7
February 5	(class canceled)		Lab 1
February 10	Serial Communication	Ch. 4, 6
February 12	VHDL 1	VHDL	Lab 2
February 17	VHDL 2
February 19	VHDL 3		Lab 3
February 24	Video		Proj. Proposal
February 26	Memory	Ch. 5	Lab 4
March 2	(class canceled)
March 4			Lab 5 Midterm Out
March 9
March 11			Midterm Due
March 15-19	Spring Break
March 23
March 25			Lab 6
March 30
April 1			Proj. Design
April 6
April 8
April 13
April 15			Demo
April 20
April 22
April 27
April 29
May 10-11	Project Demos
May 11	Project Reports and .tar.gz files Due

Required Text

Frank Vahid and Tony Givargis.
Embedded System Design: A Unified Hardware/Software Introduction.
Wiley, 2002.

Deliberately blurs the line between hardware and software implementation of embedded system components.

Near Columbia, this is available at Papyrus Booksellers at the corner of 114th and Broadway. Textbooks are downstairs.

The Project

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

A short project proposal describing in broad terms what you plan to build and how you plan to build it
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.
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.
A presentation on your project to the class
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:

An overview of your project: a revised version of your project proposal.
The detailed project design documents: a revised version of the project design.
A section listing who did what and what lessons you learned and advice for future projects
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

game: Pacman-like video game (Cristian)