Objectives

• How to go about designing complex, high speed digital systems (not just circuits)?
• How to use some of the modern CAD tools to help with the design?
• How to implement such designs using programmable logic (e.g. FPGAs)?
• How to read data sheets and make sense of them?
• How do digital building blocks (such as memory chips, microprocessors, arithmetic circuits etc.) work?
• How to interface to microprocessors and computers (from hardware point of view)?
• How to deal with testing of complex systems?

Textbooks

"Digital Design, Principles & Practices", J.F. Wakerly, 4th Edition (Sept 05) Prentice Hall
An excellent text-book that is well worth getting. £72 from www.amazon.co.uk.

"High-Speed Digital Design - A handbook of black magic", Johnson, Graham.
Practical guide to designing and building very high speed digital circuits. Excellent reference book. £71 from www.amazon.co.uk

"Contemporary Logic Design" Gaetano Boriello, Randy H. Katz, Prentice Hall, 2004
This is an excellent book that straddle second year syllabus and the third year. It is not cheap, but is worth buying if you have not got a good digital text book already. In my opinion, possibly the best around at the moment. £47 from www.amazon.co.uk.

"FPGA-based System Design " Wayne Wolf, Prentice Hall, 2004, ISBN 0131424610 (£75)
Good on FPGA architecture, but somewhat pricey for what you get.

Lecture Notes

Week	Lectures	Labs	Supporting materials
1	Topic 1 - Introduction & Design Methodologies
2	Topic 2 - Programmable Logic Devices	DE2 Lab1	FPGA and CPLD Architecture: A Tutorial Xilinx's Beginners Guide to FPGAs
3	Topic 3 - Modern FPGA architectures	DE2 Lab 2 DE2-70 pin assignment file (Needed for the lab)	Altera Cyclone-II Architecture
4	Topic 4 - Arithmetic Circuits	DE2 Lab 3	Paper: "Comparison of addition structures synthesis over commercial FPGAs"
5	Topic 5 - Function Evaluation	DE2 Lab 4	Paper: "A survey of CORDIC algorithms ..." Paper: "Distributed Arithmetic in FPGA-based Signal Processing"
6	Tutorial about the coursework by Ed Stott Framework Design Files (zipped file) Framework Functional Description PIXEL_MAP.vhd	Coursework Specification	Clown image file (zipped) Matlab functions (rotate.m, Show.m) Ripple effect (ripple.avi)
7	Topic 6 - Clocking & Metastability	Video effect coursework	Cyclone II Device Handbook, Vol. 1, p. 2-37 to 2-61
8	Topic 7 - Practical Design & I/O Topic 8 - Memory & Memory Interfacing	Video effect coursework	TI App Notes "Designing with Logic" XAPP133, “Using the Virtex Select I/O Resource”
9	Topic 9 - JTAG Boundary Scan	Video effect coursework	Boundary scan tutorial from ASSET InterTech Inc.
10	Topic 10 - Bus Architecture	Live Demo

Coursework (A wiki has been set up for the coursework HERE)

Teaching Assistant on this course: Edward Stott (email). Please contact Edward if you need help with any coursework problems.

The coursework is based around either Xilinx's XUP Board (with Virtex-II Pro) or Altera's Development and Evaluation Board (DE2-70). This is scheduled to start from 1st Feb 2009.

• Xilinx Virtex II Pro family FPGA Data Sheet, ver. 4.0, June 2004 (2.5MB)
• Xilinx University Program Virtex-II Pro Development System - Hardware Reference Manual
• Xilinx University Program Virtex-II Pro Development System - Board Schematics
• Xilinx University Program Virtex-II Pro Development System - Web page

You can also find the description of the DE-II board here (User Manual , Tutorials, Software). You can obtain a web version of the Quartus-II software from Altera here.

For those of you wanting a revision of basic digital logic (and Quartus-II software at the same time), you may try our Year 1 experiment here. You are strongly recommended to go through Lab exercises 1 to 4 from Altera before 1st Feb 2008, so that you are ready for the coursework.

Web Resources for this course

E1 Digital Electronics 1 Course Page

E2 Digital Electronics 2 Course Page