Class Information

• Course description
• Teaching staff
• Class schedule
• Syllabus
• Prerequisites
• Textbook
• Collaboration
• Policy: Grading

Course description

This course covers the principles of embedded systems inherent to many hardware platforms and applications being developed for ubiquitous systems, robotics, communication and networking systems, multimedia devices, etc.

The CE435 course is lab-oriented advanced undergraduate/graduate course geared towards the development of skills to design and implement practical embedded systems. The course includes weekly lab sessions, in which the students will use FPGA boards and tools to design, optimize and test hardware and software components of an embedded system. The weekly labs will gradually build a processor-based System On Chip to implement an application using a variety of software and hardware methods: running as a single thread in an embedded processor and as a hardware accelerator. The students will evaluate the performance of each solution and will present their work in a technical report.
The CE435 course also includes a project experience geared towards the development of skills to design and implement practical embedded systems. Students will work in teams on an innovative project that will include hands-on design of a prototype of an embedded system of their own choice. Although FPGAs is a potential project platform, students are free to choose any platform such as DSPs, ARM microcontrollers, etc. The lecture content will cover background material intended to complement the project work, and will also cover case studies of industrial embedded systems.

Teaching staff

Class meetings

Syllabus

• Introduction to Embedded Systems
• FPGA/ASIC design methodology
• Introduction to HDL and Verilog
• Modern FPGAs - FPGA architecture and technology
  Xilinx Zedboard as case study
• Timing issues - Synthesis, Placement and Routing in FPGAs
• Design methodologies
  Specification, Planning, Review, Implementation, Testing
• Embedded Processors
  Case study : ARM9 processor, Hardware and Software
• Communication in Embedded Systems
  Buses (AMBA bus), Switches, Network On Chips technologies
• DRAM technology and organization - Memory Controllers
• System On Chip design
• Hardware/Software partition and co-design
• Optimization process: software and hardware approaches
• Architectural Synthesis tools

Prerequisites

• CE 238 "Computer Systems Organizations"
• CE 430 "Digital Systems Lab"
• Good knowledge of digital design
• Good programming skills (in C)
• Willingness to do hands-on work

Textbooks

There is no required textbook for the class. The lectures are based on a variety of resources such as textbooks, papers, and product data sheets. Check under Resources for an up-to-date set of reading material

• Xilinx FPGA user guides
  
• Computers as Components: Principles of Embedded Computing System Design,
  by Wayne Wolf , Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 2001.
• Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach,
  by J. Hennessy, D. Patterson , Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 3rd or 4th edition
  
  

Advice: Internet is a vast resource of information on embedded systems. You should use it

Collaboration policy

Designing the software and hardware components of a system is, by definition, a team effort. As future engineers, you will co-operate with colleagues having potentially very different background and expertise, to build a larger system.
For this class you are allowed, in fact you are encouraged, to receive feedback from any number of resources, such as the instructors, your classmates, the Internet, etc. However, your solutions must be your own. You should not, any under circumstances, copy another person's solution. Submitting someone else's code or writing code for someone else outside your team is academic fraud and will result into expulsion from the class. For group assignment, each team is responsible for task management and allocation.

Grading policy

Designed by Nikos Bellas(nbellas at inf dot uth dot gr)