Electronic design for Communications

Abstract

• This course provides and overview of different enabling hardware technologies for real-time processing applied to embedded systems.
• It is a companion course to "Signal Processing Technologies" and mandatory in the "Real-time and Embedded systems" track.
• Software and hardware aspects, system integration, design and validation tools are studied.
• The main goal is to reach a sufficient level of understanding to design alone a prototype system embedding one or several hardware operators for the processing and a micro-processor, plus its peripherals, for the control. A hands-on approach is taken, with the aid of state-of-the-art laboratory equipment.
• During the final project the students design an actual prototype on a FPGA-based prototyping board, design the embedded software, connect the board to a host PC and test their application. Examples of past projects: hardware accelerator for a cryptographic enciphering algorithm, or for an image processing one, ...

Bibliography

• Application specific integrated circuits, Smith, Michael John Sebastian, Addison-Wesley - 06/1997 - 1040 p. 
• VHDL for logic synthesis, Rushton, Andrew, John Wiley & Sons - 1998 - 375 p.
• The designer's guide to VHDL, Ashenden, Peter J, Morgan Kaufmann - 06/2008 - 936 p.
• Embedded systems handbook, Zurawski, Richard, CRC Press - 16/08/2005 - 1160 p.

Description

• VHDL / Verilog: Hardware description languages, design methods and logic synthesis of hardware accelerators, simulation, formal verification by model checking, design of simple processing devices.
• Integrated circuits : design of hardware accelerators, estimation of silicon area and maximum reachable clock frequency.
• FPGA : design and rapid prototyping of micro-processor based systems, design of embedded software applications, performance evaluation, design of hardware co-processors to speedup the software processing, system integration, performance evaluation