CSEE 4840 Embedded System Design Spring 2020

General Information

Class meets Fridays, 10:10 - 12:40 PM in 633 Mudd.

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 24	Introduction: Embedded Systems SystemVerilog
Fri Jan 31	Memory
Fri Feb 7	Video Networking, USB, and Threads
Thu Feb 13	(none)		Lab 1 Files
Fri Feb 14	Hardware/Software Interfaces The Avalon Bus
Fri Feb 21	Device Drivers Qsys and IP Core Integration		Proposal
Thu Feb 27	(none)		Lab 2 Files 16 GB SD Card Image
Fri Feb 28	(lecture cancelled)
Fri Mar 6	Sprite Graphics Line drawing example Processors, FPGAs, and ASICs (1/2) Processors, FPGAs, and ASICs (2/2)
Fri Mar 13	Debugging Audio Waveforms
Mar 16-20	Spring Break
Thu Mar 26	(none)		Lab 3 Hardware files Software FIles Kernel Module Env.
Fri Mar 27
Thu Apr 2	(none)		Design document
Fri Apr 3	Design reviews
Fri Apr 10
Fri Apr 17
Fri Apr 24
Fri May 1
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

GAA: Genetic Algorithm Accelerator (MB) Proposal Design Jarrett Ross and Graham Stubbs

autotune: Audio Processor (MB) Proposal Design Report Fuming Qiu and Luna Ruiz

moon-patrol: Videogame (SK) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Pratyush Agrawal, Peter Mansour, Aaron Pickard, and Shabhari Saravanan

nes: Nintendo Entertainment System Emulator (SE) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Jeffrey Jaquith, Minghao Li, and Zachary Schuermann

phoenix: Phoenix-like Video Game (SE) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Vaishnavi Murthy, Ignacio Ramirez Sr., and Brianna Williams

tank: Videogame (SK) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Wenzhe He and Zixiang Zheng

tetris: Videogame (SK) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Arsalaan Ansari, Sooyeon Jo, Joshua Learn, and Kevin Li

webrender: HTML Renderer (MB) Proposal Design Report Presentation Files Alex Patrick Gajewski and Allison Ghuman

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.

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 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