Structured Hardware Design (50% option only)

Lecturer: Dr D.J. Greaves (djg@cl.cam.ac.uk)

No. of lectures: 6

This course is a prerequisite for the Group Project (Part IB), ECAD (Part IB) and for VLSI Design (Part II).

Aims

The aims of this course are to introduce the principles and techniques used in the design of hardware systems. The course examines the hardware building blocks that are currently available, and discusses how designs may be partitioned to make best use of these components. It will be illustrated with case studies that show how a number of ``real-life'' hardware systems have been implemented.

Lectures

• Building blocks for digital electronics and HDL. D-type, clock enable, broadside register, ROM, RAM, ALU, microprocessor.

• Clocking and synchronous FSM combination. Finite state machines: Mealy, Moore, composition and pipelining. Decomposition. Set and hold times, clock skew. FSMs on different clocks. Asynchronous boundaries. Gated clocks.

• Technology, speed, power, gate delays. Model of a gate, derating of a model with load and temperature. Delay-power product. Standard parts, ASICs, PALs and FPGAs.

• Hardware versus software, microcontrollers, embedded systems, design partitioning.

• Design partitioning examples.

• Worked example.

Objectives

At the end of the course students should

• begin to be able to partition designs into appropriate hardware and software sub-systems

• know what kinds of component are available to the hardware designer, and know when to use software and firmware

• understand data communication between separate systems including issues of flow control and clock skew

• know techniques for building state machines that have different performance/density tradeoffs

Recommended book

Floyd, T.L. (1997). Digital Fundamentals. Prentice-Hall.