ARM project

Project leader: Frank Stajano
Demonstrators: Dan Gordon, Paul Roberts, Panit Watcharawitch, Andrew West, Ford Wong.

This project is based on the ECAD and Architecture workshops designed and lectured by Dr Simon Moore at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. Simon's cooperation has been invaluable and is very gratefully acknowledged.

This is everyone.

For posterity: Andy Wild (round of applause) was the only student who completed this year's bonus track. Click on his nose to see a very amateurish video (26 MB mpg) of his brilliant achievement.

Introduction

This 4-week project sits at the boundary between hardware and software. You will be designing hardware circuits and programming a RISC processor. More specifically, you will build circuits by programming an Altera FPGA in Verilog (a hardware description language), and you will connect those circuits to an ARM 7 processor that you will program in ARM assembly language.

The goal of the project is to build a mouse interface for the ARM and write a rudimentary device driver allowing the ARM to read out the absolute 2D position of the mouse.

Timetable

This project runs in the Intel Lab (room SW11, second floor) at the Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building on the West Cambridge site. Follow the links for directions; this is not on the main Engineering site.

Repeat the following pattern for 4 weeks, starting Monday 2004-05-10.

"Mandatory" means it's a timetabled session for this project. You have to be there at those times or you will be penalized at the rate of 1 mark per hour missed. I will use some of this time to introduce you to Verilog and ARM assembler. You will use the rest to program the devices yourself. During these sessions you will each have access to an individual workstation with the appropriately licensed software tools, and you will be issued one teaching board each. Demonstrators will be available to provide guidance and to help you using the tools (though not to solve the assignments).

On top of the mandatory timetabled slots, you are expected to spend about 12 more hours per week on your own on this project. You are welcome to go to the Intel lab at any time during the opening hours of the building and use the available facilities when it best suits you. At those unsupervised times, however, only 6 workstations will be equipped with teaching boards; the others will have just the software tools.

Remember that your work for each week is assessed by a demonstrator on the Thursday of that week, so you have no extra time to clean things up afterwards.

Weekly mini-reports

1. Electronic Dice in Verilog (easy)
2. String sort in ARM assembler (hard)
3. Mouse interface in Verilog (easy)
4. Reading the mouse from the ARM (hard)

By the last session of every week you must submit a mini-report; this includes giving a live demonstration of your running hardware to one of the demonstrators. The mini-report is much shorter than the usual "interim reports" of most other projects and contains practically no prose. It consists of your commented ARM/Verilog code plus brief answers to a couple of questions on that week's task. You must submit your mini-report by the last timetabled session of each week (Thursdays 11:00-13:00). This is a serious deadline that nobody should miss: the penalty for late demos/mini-reports is 3 marks per weekday (Mon-Fri), which means you'd waste at least 6 marks since there is no session on Fri. It is of course acceptable to submit a mini-report ahead of time at some earlier session, although you don't get any extra marks for this.

To submit a mini-report you must collect three ticks in order, all before that week's deadline:

1. Complete the program code (Verilog and/or ARM as appropriate) required for that week's subtask, ensuring that it is properly formatted and commented. Follow the format of the supplied template (Verilog or assembly language).
2. Put answers to any questions in comments at the end of your code. Ensure that you add the subtask's title and your name in a comment at the top of the code. This set of source code files is your mini-report.
3. Show a running demonstration of your work to a demonstrator to have it assessed. If the demonstrators points out any flaws, you are allowed (but not obliged) to fix and resubmit, so long as it's done by the deadline. Having witnessed your (last) demo, whether your circuit works or not, the demonstrator will give you Tick #1.
4. Email your mini-report as a file attachment to me (fms27 at cam), with a subject line of "ARM project submission, week N", with N in the range 1-4 as appropriate. (For some odd reason, it is apparently very hard for people to write the subject line as requested. However, if you manage to get it right first time on ALL of your submissions for this project, I'll give you a small prize of two extra marks at the end. Easy money!) If your mini-report consists of more than one file, attach them all to the same mail message. Do not zip, tar, gzip etc: just send the raw source code (.s or .v). When I receive your correctly submitted mail, I'll give you Tick #2.
5. Hand in to any demonstrator your anonymous weekly feedback form and, separately of course, a printed version of your mini-report with its completed cover sheet. This gets you Tick #3.

All these steps must be completed before the end of the corresponding Thursday session.

Final report

You must also prepare a final report of not more than 7 pages. It is strongly preferred that you compose it using Latex and the Springer LNCS style (use the llncs.cls class found in llncs2e.zip). If you are new to Latex, here is an example file (Latex source and pdf output) and the style sheet to use. Do not modify the style sheet. If you use any other method than Latex, it is your responsibility to make sure that the layout (margins, font sizes, words per page and so on) exactly matches that of the LNCS style.

The spirit of the report is to explain to your readers what you gained, in all possible dimensions, from taking part in this project. This, of course, will be a reflection of how much you put in. The report should be a critical assessment of the work performed and the skills acquired, as opposed to a flat chronicle of what was done. Even when some of the weekly deliverables were poor or incomplete, the final report can stil get full marks if it shows that the author learnt something useful from the experience.

Keep the report to a maximum of 7 sides of LNCS or it will be penalized in the marking. The recommended format, which will help you produce a well structured report of the correct length, is as follows.

1. Introduction. (0.5 pages).
2. Weekly tasks. Individual descriptions of the four weekly tasks, highlighting your "light bulb" moments (useful insights you got while performing that week's task, or moments when you got over a major stumbling block) and any significant design decisions you took (roughly 0.5--1 page per week, total 2--4 pages).
3. Challenges and lessons learned. A commented list of the most interesting problems you encountered, the way you solved them, the most useful techniques you adopted to identify and fix bugs in your Verilog and ARM code, and the general lessons you learned from your experience with this project. (1--2 pages).
4. Conclusions. (0.5 pages).
5. Appendix: your weekly mini-reports and their cover sheets (only the first three, since the last one will not have been returned to you by the time you submit the final report).
6. Complete the last of your supplied cover sheets and prepend it to the report.

To submit the report:

1. Email me (fms27 at cam) a PDF version of the final report as a file attachment, with a subject line of "ARM project submission, final report". Do not zip, tar, gzip etc: just send the raw PDF.
2. Hand in a printed version of the final report, with your first three mini-reports as an appendix, to the Teaching Office.

Both of these must be received by 17:00 on Friday 4th June 2004 (last day of week 4 of the project, but not a timetabled session). This is the most serious deadline of the project: the department will grant no extensions to it.

Marking

Each weekly mini-report is worth up to 15 marks, for a subtotal of 60 marks. The criteria that will be used for assessment are the following, most important first.

• Demonstrating a live working solution
• Clearly commenting and formatting the code
• Demonstrating good programming style
• Writing correct code
• Correctly answering the questions

The final report is worth up to 20 marks and will be assessed on the following criteria.

• Giving a logical and complete account of what was done
• Demonstrating a grasp of the core ideas and skills acquired during the project
• Clarity of ideas
• Clarity of language (readability and correctness of your English prose)

The total for the whole project is therefore 80 marks.

Note that this is not a team project and all work must be carried out individually.

Bonus Track

The time it takes people to complete the standard tasks varies greatly. For those of you who can complete the standard tasks in much less time than allocated, a bonus track is available. Note in passing that completing a weekly task as soon as possible doesn't usually yield the highest marks. It is advisable to complete the 4 tasks of the standard track with elegance and style, particularly with respect to a legible and well structured source code, before devoting time to the bonus track.

The main deliverable for the bonus track is a tic-tac-toe (aka noughts and crosses) game, using the mouse as input and the VGA monitor as output. The display output and the strategy of the computer player can be extremely rudimentary: it is ok to use red and green rectangles (and no grid) instead of the noughts and crosses, and even to let the computer play entirely at random. Use your own taste.

Unlike what happens with the standard tasks, there will be no handholding. You will have to find out by yourself how to drive the monitor (with care so that you don't blow it up) and all the design choices will be your own, including whether to do everything in the FPGA or whether to use the ARM as well.

To qualify for the bonus track you must also complete two auxiliary deliverables.

1. Verilog: implement a 2-second delay line—something behaving like this delay.sof. You will find useful hints in Simon Moore's ECAD Workshop 2. Note, however, that the "delay" module on that page, unlike the one contained in this .sof file, does not really delay an entire waveform.
2. ARM assembly language: implement the prime number program from ECAD workshop 4.

Bonus track submission

Do all of the following in order.

1. Submit all 4 weekly mini-reports as usual.
2. Submit (in the same sense of collecting three ticks, and using a subject line of "ARM project submission, bonus track",) the source code for the two auxiliary deliverables. Until you do this, your bonus track deliverable won't be looked at, let alone marked.
3. Submit (again: three ticks, and subject line of "ARM project submission, bonus track") the source for the main deliverable.
4. Write a report about the main bonus deliverable, but not the auxiliary ones, in at most 2 sides of LNCS A4 and include it as part of your final report.

Bonus track marking

• The two auxiliary deliverables attract no marks, but are required as preliminaries.
• The source code and live demo for the main bonus deliverable is worth up to 15 points and replaces, at your own risk if you submit it, the lowest-scoring of your first three mini-reports.
• Up to 5 bonus points may be awarded to the 2-page report about the main bonus deliverable.
• Independently of whether you attempt the bonus track or not, you will receive two bonus marks if the subject lines of all your file-attached email submissions are as requested.
• The theoretical maximum score for the project is therefore 87/80. After deduction of any applicable penalties, any scores above 80 will be clipped back to 80.

Departmental warnings

• For non-attendance at timetabled sessions you will lose 1 mark per hour missed.
• For late submission of interim reports you will lose 3 marks per weekday.
• No extension to the final report deadline of 17:00 on Friday 4 June will be permitted.
• You will have to sign a declaration that you are submitting your own work.
• You will not receive any indication of any marks for your interim or final reports. Your college may inform you of your final mark after publication of the final class lists.
• Any applications for allowances for illness must be submitted by your College Tutor to the Teaching Office as soon as possible. It must be received by Monday 7 June.

Useful online references

Verilog

• Dan Hyde's Verilog handbook (also available as PDF) is a fairly complete description of the language.
• Tutorial slides (PDF) by Donald Thomas, co-inventor of Verilog.
• The Doulos tutorial on Verilog.

ARM assembler

• Peter Cockerell's excellent 1987 book ARM Assembly Language Programming (HTML and PDF) is a useful reference to keep around while writing code, particularly chapter 3, The Instruction Set.
• Concise summaries can also be found in Simon Moore's Computer Design (PDF) course notes, in lectures 3 and 4.
• I can't put a link to it from here, but the ARM developer suite comes with a library of "Online books" about the tools and the ARM processor itself. You can access this documentation from the Start menu: the shortcut is in the same menu from which you launch Code Warrior.

ARM/Altera teaching board

• The home page and FAQ for Simon Moore's ECAD and Architecture workshops at the Computer Laboratory on which this project is based.
• Documentation for the board, from an extensive list of memos about the Altera/ARM hardware.

Related lecture course material

• Richard Prager's lecture notes on Combinational Logic (PDF), Sequential Logic (PDF) and Microprocessors (PDF).
• Simon Moore's lecture notes on ECAD (PDF) and Computer Design (PDF). Note that, by explicit request of the author, these files should not be accessed from outside cam.ac.uk, so please don't pass them on.