10907 - Electronics of Digital Systems

Learning outcomes

The course will provide the necessary know-how about the basics of digital electronics at device, circuit and gate level. Upon attendance of the course, the student will also learn to perform, from the designer's perspective, analyses and critical evaluations of the main architectures for computing, communications, data storage. The course will also focus on learning computer aided digital design techniques and hardware description languages (HDL), with a special care to programmable logic devices, logic synthesis and simulation.

Course contents

INTRODUCTION. Introduction to digital circuits and systems.

DIGITAL LOGIC CIRCUITS. Operating principles and electrical characteristics of junction diodes and MOS transistors. Static logic circuits: CMOS, pseudo-nMOS, pass transistor logic. Dynamic logic circuits: CMOS Domino, np-CMOS. Power consumption in digital circuits.

SEQUENTIAL LOGIC CIRCUITS. Principle of bistability and state of a circuit. CMOS/nMOS implementations of latches and multiplexers. Master-slave and edge triggered registers. Setup, hold and propagation times of a register from the circuit point of view. Dynamic and C2MOS registers

SEMICONDUCTOR MEMORIES. Decoder circuits. Static RAMs. Sense amplifier for SRAM. Dynamic RAMs. Sense amplifier for DRAM. The floating-gate transistor. EPROM, E2PROM and FLASH memories.

ARCHITECTURES. Architecture of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. Granularity, area and performance. Logic blocks, switches, interconnections. Architecture of Altera devices. Microprocessors, classification, architectures and exmples. Microntrollers. The Microchip PIC microcontroller. DSP: main features and comparison with general-purpose microprocessors. Laboratory sessions: design of basic microcontroller systems.

COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS. Hand-shake protocols and parallel ports. Serial communication with UART ports. SPI protocol. I2C protocol. 1-wire protocol. USB protocol. JTAG protocol.

VHDL: history and purposes. VHDL as a design tool. Design flow for FPGAs. Entity and architectures. Concurrent statements. Structural descriptions and components. VHDL operators. Processes and sequential constructs. Sequential logic and registers. Description style for synthesizable VHDL. Finite State Machines. Design examples. Laboratory sessions: design of digital systems with hardware development boards.

Readings/Bibliography

D. Esseni, "Fondamenti di Circuiti Digitali Integrati", SGEditoriali Padova, ISBN 88-89884-01-0

J. Rabaey, A.Chandrakasan, B.Nikolic: “Digital Integrated Circuits: A design perspective”/“Circuti integrati digitali: l'ottica del progettista”, 2nd /3rd Edition, Prentice Hall 2003

D. Perry, "VHDL. Programming by examples", McGraw-Hill Professional; 4th edition, 2002

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

Course materials available online

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

The assessment is composed of two parts:
- oral examination, about the contents presented during the course
- practice, consisting in the design of a simple digital system with VHDL language and synthesis/simulation tools.

Teaching tools

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

Links to further information

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

Office hours

See the website of Aldo Romani