Overview: This lab aims at providing the students with the practical concepts of designing digital hardware systems.

• It provides an overview of the design process, starting from very simple circuits to the design of processors with prototyping on FPGAs and using HDL  languages
• It covers the main design and implementation issues for digital devices and their applications. These issues challenge the students to make design decisions to optimize the designed hardware under constrained resources.
• The students gain in-depth practical experiences in digital system design with a focus on hardware development and implementing custom peripheral, e.g., display interface and input buttons, for processors
• Students experience the process of High-Level Synthesis where software descriptions (for instance in C) are (semi-)automatically transformed to hardware

Lab’s Goals:       

• Introducing the students to hardware design
• Familiarizing the students with the challenges faced in hardware design, e.g., glitches, timing violations, etc.
• The students shall be able to implement and design custom useful and interesting hardware and they shall be able to develop/use debug interfaces to check for errors

Target Audience: 

• This lab is suitable for electrical engineering and informatics students and those who have an interest in digital systems design and digital techniques

Prerequisites:

• The ability to develop simple software programs in C is recommended.
• Basic knowledge about other programming languages can be helpful (e.g., Java or Python)
• No previous knowledge of FPGA or HDL programming needed!
• Attending the TI lecture, to understand

Details:

• The lab manuals and exercises are conducted only in English.
• The lab is split into weekly sessions throughout the semester. Each session is approximately 3-4 hours per week. At the end of the semester, there will be a final project.
• State-of-the-art FPGA-based MPSoCs and FPGA design software are used in the lab, i.e., the Blackboard FPGA development board and the Vivado 2022.2 software