ECE 69500 - System-on-chip Design
Course Details
Lecture Hours: 3 Credits: 3
Counts as:
Experimental Course Offered:
Spring 2009
Catalog Description:
The incessant drive of Moore's law has created an era where most electronic systems contain chips that integrate various (hitherto discrete) components such as microprocessor, DSPs, dedicated hardware processing engines, memories, and interfaces to I/O devices and off-chip storage. Most electronic systems today - cell phones, iPods, set-top boxes, digital TVs, automobiles - contain at least one such "System-on-chip". Designing System-on-chips is a highly complex process. Before entering the traditional VLSI implementation process (RTL, logic & physical design), design teams need to perform the challenging tasks of developing a functional specification, partitioning and mapping of functions onto hardware components and software, design of a communication architecture to interconnect the components, functional/performance/power analysis and validation, and more. This course will present students with an insight into the earlier stages of the System-on-chip design process (what happens before you get down to RTL, gates, transistors, and wires). In addition to the conceptual foundations, this course will also involve significant hands-on assignments and/or a project that will give students an exposure to state-of-the-art design methodologies and platforms.
Required Text(s):
None.
Recommended Text(s):
- ARM System-on-Chip Architecture , 2nd Edition , Steve Furber , Addison-Wesley , 2000
- ESL Design and Verification: A Prescription for Electronic System Level Methodology (Systems on Silicon Series) , Grant Martin, Brian Bailey, Andrew Piziali , Morgan Kaufmann , 2007
- Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chips (Systems on Silicon Series) , Ahmed Jerraya and Wayne Wolf , Morgan Kaufmann , 2004
- Surviving the SOC Revolution - A Guide to Platform-Based Design , Henry Chang, L.R. Cooke, Merrill Hunt, Grant Martin, Andrew McNelly and Lee Todd , Springer , 1999
Lecture Outline:
Weeks | Topics |
---|---|
1 | Introduction to SoCs, technology trends, design challenges |
2 | SoC building blocks (processors and other IP cores) |
2 | System-level specification (System C) |
1 | HW/SW partitioning |
3 | Designing function-specific accelerators (HW accelerators, application-specific instruction processors, interfacing accelerators to microprocessors) |
2 | On-chip communication architecture: Buses, Networks-on-chip |
2 | Performance / power analysis of SoCs (HW-SW co-simulation) |
1 | Current research trends in SoC design |
Assessment Method:
none