CSEE 4840 Embedded System Design Spring 2019

General Information

Class meets Fridays, 10:10 - 12:40 PM in 717 Hamilton.

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 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
Fri Jan 25	Introduction: Embedded Systems SystemVerilog
Fri Feb 1	Memory Video
Fri Feb 8	Networking, USB, and Threads
Thu Feb 14	(none)		Lab 1 Files
Fri Feb 15	Hardware/Software Interfaces The Avalon Bus
Fri Feb 22	Device Drivers Qsys and IP Core Integration		Proposal
Thu Feb 28	(none)		Lab 2 Files 16 GB SD Card Image
Fri Mar 1	Line drawing example Sprite Graphics Processors, FPGAs, and ASICs
Fri Mar 8	Debugging Audio Waveforms
Thu Mar 14	(none)		Lab 3 Hardware files Software FIles Kernel Module Env.
Fri Mar 15
Mar 18-22	Spring Break
Fri Mar 29			Design
Fri Apr 5			Milestone 1
Fri Apr 12
Fri Apr 19			Milestone 2
Fri Apr 26
Fri May 3			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 teams 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).

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

3D: Graphics Accelerator (MB) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Jie Huang, Chao Lin, Zixiong Liu, and Kaige Zhang

BrickBreaker: Videogame (JH) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Rui Chen, Bingyao Shi, Shao-Fu Wu, and Dajing Xu

Centipede: Videogame (JH) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Ken Geng, Donglai Guo, Xuyang Liu, and Ziyu Zhou

Chip-8: Videogame Emulator (SE) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Jennifer Bi, Nelson Gomez, Kundan Guha, and Justin Wong

GC: Hardware Garbage Collection (SE) Proposal Report Presentation Files Martha Barker

GameBoy: Videogame Emulator (SE) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Justin Hu, Christopher Smith, and Nanyu Zeng

HotSprings: Water Simulator (MB) Proposal Report Presentation Files Shanglin Guo, Guanxuan Li, Yiqi Sun, and Hongyu Zou

LoopStation: Music Synthesizer (JH) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Doga Ozesmi, Varun Varahabhotla, Lancelot Wathieu, and Evan Ziebart

Oscilloscope: Waveform Visualizer (SE) Proposal Report Presentation Files Tvisha Gangwani, Jino Haro, Ishraq Khandaker, Klarizsa Padilla, and Zhongtai Ren

Sand: Sand etc. Simulator (MB) Proposal Report Presentation Files Jeremy Adkins and James Kolsby

StrEEtFight: Beat-em-up Videogame (JH) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Alan Armero, Cansu Cabuk, and Daniel Mesko

TNShazam: Music Recognizer (MB) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Eitan Kaplan, Tomin Perea-Chamblee, and Jose Rubianes

VGG16: Neural Network Accelerator (MB) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Xingyu Hou, Wenqi Jiang, Ke Xu, and Manqi Yang

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.

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. 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 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