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Computer Science Syllabus - ECAD
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ECAD

Lecturer: Dr S.W. Moore

No. of lectures and practicals: 4 + 8

Prerequisite course: Digital Electronics

This course is a prerequisite for VLSI Design (Part II).

Aims

This course aims to introduce electronic computer aided design (ECAD) with a particular emphasis on the Verilog hardware description language (HDL). The course differs from previous years since the first four lectures have been replaced by an interactive tutor system to teach Verilog (the Intelligent Verilog Compiler, or IVC). The IVC will be used for the first two laboratory sessions and completed as homework. The material the IVC covers is a prerequisite for the remaining seven practical sessions. Material taught is prerequisite for the remaining seven practical sessions.

Lectures

  • Introduction and motivation. Current technology, technology trends, ECAD trends, challenges.

  • Logic modelling, simulation and synthesis. Logic value and delay modelling. Discrete event and device simulation. Automatic logic minimisation.

  • Chip, board and system testing. Production testing, fault models, testability, fault coverage, scan path testing.

  • Verilog systems design. Practicalities of mapping Verilog and ARM assembler onto an FPGA board. Signal processing of inputs. Tips and pitfalls when generating larger modular designs.

On-Line Learning Component: Interactive Verilog Compiler

  • The interactive Verilog compiler (IVC) teaches the synthesisable subset of Verilog which is required to complete the laboratory sessions.

Objectives

At the end of the course students should

  • be able to design, prototype and debug circuits using Verilog targeted at programmable gate arrays (FPGA)

  • understand circuit simulation, synthesis and testing concepts

  • appreciate hardware/software codesign

Recommended books

The following books are recommended for reference only:

Smith, D.R. & Franzon, P.D. Verilog styles for synthesis of digital systems. Prentice Hall.
Thomas, D.E. & Moorby, P. (1995). The Verilog hardware description language. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Sternheim, E., Singh, R., Madhaven, R. & Trivedi, Y. (1993). Digital design and synthesis with Verilog HDL. Automata.

From the Part IA Digital Electronics course:

Katz, R.H. (1994). Contemporary logic design. Benjamin/Cummings.

Pointers to sources of more specialist information are included in the lecture notes and on the associated course web page.



next up previous contents
Next: Floating-Point Computation Up: Michaelmas Term 2006: Part Previous: Concurrent Systems and Applications   Contents
Christine Northeast
Tue Sep 12 09:56:33 BST 2006