18020 - Digital Systems Electronics L-A

Learning outcomes

The course will provide the necessary know-how to perform, from the designer's point of view, analyses and critical evaluations of the main architectures for computing, communications, data storage. The course will focus also on learning digital design techniques and hardware description languages (HDL), with a special care to programmable logic devices, logic synthesis and simulation.

Course contents

Introduction to digital circuits and systems. Parameters for characterization of digital circuits

Binary representation of numbers. Sum and difference of binary numbers.Ripple-Carry Adder. Carry-Bypass Adder. Carry-Select Adder. Carry-Lookahead Adder. Carry-Save multiplier. Wallace-tree multiplier. Booth encoding.

Architecture of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. Granularity, area and performance. Logic blocks, switches, interconnections. Architecture of the main Altera devices. Microprocessors, classification, architectures and exmples.
Architecture of DLX and Intel Pentium processors. MMX technology. Embedded systems and bus architectures. Reconfigurable computing. Microntrollers. The Microchip PIC microcontroller. DSP. Comparison with general-purpose microprocessors. Reference architectures for DSP. The DSP family TI TMS320C1x. VLIW architectures for signal processing. Example: FFT.

Hand-shake protocols and parallel ports. Serial communication with UART ports. SPI protocol. I2C protocol. 1-wire protocol. AMBA Bus.

Semiconductor memories. Decoder circuits. Static RAMs. Sense amplifier for SRAM. Dynamic RAMs. ROM and PROM. PLA devices and their structure. The floating-gate transistor. EPROM, E2PROM and FLASH memories.

VHDL: history and purposes. VHDL as a design tool. Design flow for FPGAs. Entity and architectures. Concurrent statements. Structural descriptions and components. VHDL operators. Process and sequential constructs. Sequential logic and registers. Description style for synthesizable VHDL. Finite State Machines. Design examples.

Readings/Bibliography

J. Rabaey, Digital Integrated Circuits, Prentice Hall.

Course slides and notes, available online.

J. Rose, A. El-Gamal, A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Architecture of
Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, Proc. IEEE, vol. 81, n. 7, July 1993, pp.1013-1029 (IEEE article).

Teaching methods

Besides normal class activity, a relevant part of the course will be spent in our laboratories in order to learn hardware description languages and digital design tools. Many laboratory sessions will focus on practicing microcontroller/FPGA systems.

Assessment methods

Teaching tools

Presentations and class notes available online. Laboratory sessions on computer aided digital design and practice on microcontroller/FPGA systems.

Links to further information

http://www-micro.deis.unibo.it/cgi-bin/dida?~romani/www/Dida03

Office hours

See the website of Aldo Romani