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.Performance, features and factors of merits of digital circuits and logic families.

Operating principles and electrical characteristics of junction diodes, bipolar transistors and MOS transistors.
MOS static logics: FCMOS, pseudo-n-MOS, pass transistor logics. MOS dynamic logics. CMOS Domino, np-logics.
Power consumption in digital circuits.

Binary representation of numbers. Sum and difference of binary numbers. Main architectures for adders and multipliers..

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.

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

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

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