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General

The course will cover the design of sequential digital systems using FPGA (programmable logic devices) and microprocessors. The languages VHDL, assembler and C will be used. Students will have the opportunity to execise their creativity in some of the lab design assignments.

Digital systems are widely used, and their use is ever-increasing. Witness the explosion in the uses of computers, and the development of digital communications systems, etc.

Modern digital design involves the use of a range of devices, from discrete logic chips (NAND, NOR, etc), to more complex logic chips (adders, counters, flip-flops, etc), to hardware programmable logic devices and memory arrays (PLD, ROM, etc), and ultimately to software programmable microprocessors and microcontrollers. This course will teach you the basics of how digital hardware and microprocessors work and how to design digital systems to solve engineering problems. You will learn to use CAD software, and to implement a design in hardware and software. The course will teach you about microprocessors, how to write software for them, and their applications. After completing course, you will be in a position to decide on the best way to solve a problem, using hardware and/or software.

This course is considerably more design-oriented than most of the other Engineering courses you will have taken to date. In particular, the course involves hands-on design lab assignments. You will find it lots of fun!

A student may reasonably ask ``why am I being required to do this course?'' There are several reasons:

• The vast majority of electronic systems nowadays contain digital electronics. All digital computers naturally use this technology. In this course you will be exposed to the fundamentals of digital systems, sufficient for you to understand the approach used in designing and integrating digital systems. Examples of such systems are electronic ignition systems, CD players, robotic systems, modern telephone exchanges, traffic control systems, fax machines, telemetry systems etc.

• The subject contains design lab assignments, which expose you to the synthesis part of engineering (rather than analysis). Much of the material you cover in a university engineering course is analysis, whereas when you graduate you will be called upon to design and redesign systems, as well as analyse them.
• You will learn how to think clearly about sequential processes (finite state automata), and develop facilty with manipulating formal representations of them. This is important, because any task that has more than a couple of states is very hard to reason about correctly without the appropriate conceptual tools.
• You will also be exposed to and use a real-world computer aided design tools. Once you have used one or two of these, it becomes far easier to learn new ones. They are becoming very prevalent in engineering practice.

The course reflects current industry practice and recent trends in using hardware description languages for hardware design, simulation and sophisticated EDA software, programmable logic ICs, microprocessors and microcontrollers, and indeed, the increasingly blurred distinction between hardware and software in modern digital systems. In this course the focus will be on hardware design, software design, and combining them to build digital systems.

Hardware/software used in the course:

• Motorola Coldfire MCF5206 computer board.

• Xilinx FPGA board (programmable logic).

• Digital Trainer Board.

• BSVC 68000 simulator.

• Cygnus GNU gcc cross development system (assembler, compiler).

• Xilinx Foundation FPGA software.

A CDROM containing many of the software items will be available for loan to enable students to install software on their home PCs.

Course webpage: http://spigot.anu.edu.au/courses/engn3213/

See also ENGN3213 Computer and Hardware Lab Notes.

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