10907 - Electronics of Digital Systems

Learning outcomes

The course will provide the necessary know-how about digital systems at device and circuit level. Upon attendance of the course, the student will also learn to perform, from the designer's perspective, analyses and critical assessments 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. At the end of the course, the student will be able to develop digital systems based on programmable logic and microcontrollers.

Course contents

INTRODUCTION. Introduction to digital circuits and systems.

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 PIC18F microcontroller. Microcontroller programming, with examples. 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.

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

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 the laboratory of Electronics in order to learn hardware description languages and digital design tools. Many laboratory sessions will focus on practicing FPGA design and microcontroller programming, with the aid of hardware development boards available in the laboratories.

Assessment methods

The assessment is composed of two independent parts: 
- an oral examination, about the contents presented during the course, consisting in the discussion of questions in order to verify the knowledge and comprehension of course contents. The exam aims at assessing the actual comprehension level of course contents, the ability of elaborating course contents and the use of the specific technical language of the course.
- a practical examination, which will be held in the laboratories, consisting in the design of a simple digital system with the VHDL language and the synthesis/simulation tools presented in this course. The specifications to be addressed will be presented in the text of the problem. The exam aims at assessing the correctness of the proposed digital architecture, the correctness of the VHDL implementation, the ability of validating the design by means of dedicated digital simulations.

Teaching tools

Presentations and class notes available online. Laboratory sessions on computer aided digital design and practice on FPGA and  microcontroller 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