This course is not currently offered, please contact the school or faculty of your program.

Course description

[Not offered from 2012] This is a medium advanced course in digital system design. It is assumed that the participants have already acquired knowledge & skills equivalent to the material covered in COMP2100 or CSSE2000. This course builds upon that knowledge. The objective of this course is to give the students the theoretical basis & practical skills in modern design of medium size digital systems in various technologies, including standard circuits & Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The design methodology, systematically introduced & used in the course, is based on simulation & synthesis with the hardware description language (VHDL) tools. Topics covered in this course include: conceptual design step from requirements & specification to simulation & synthesis model in VHDL, design of complex controllers with Finite State Machines, design of sequential blocks with Controller-Datapath methodology, issues in design for testability, issues in timing of sequential logic, overview of implementation technologies with emphasis on FPGAs. All those topics are presented with the theoretical part directly relating to the number of design examples & problems tackled in the tutorials and practicals. The students who passed this course should have sufficient design skills to work on thesis projects in the area of microprocessor & digital design & on simpler industrial electronic design tasks.