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Note: this is an information page, the course is given through LiU's e-learning system lisam

TSIU03 - System Design

TSIU03 is an introductory course to circuit design using VHDL. The general description of the course can be found in the syllabus.

The course is intended for bachelor students with no previous knowledge in VHDL. Students are however supposed to have previous knowledge in switching theory and it is highly recommended to have studied circuit design before.

Master students (specially those that have knowledge in circuit design and programming skills) should preferably apply for the more advanced course Design of Digital Systems (TSTE12). Due to a partial overlap between the content in TSIU03 and TSTE12, it is only allowed to register for one of these courses.

Course Aim

The course includes methods and tools for the design and implementation of electronic systems using VLSI techologies. The design methods aim at reducing the design time and guarantee correct designs as well as ensuring that performance requirements are met.

The target platform is the FPGA development board DE2-115. You will learn how to configure the FPGA to perform sound manipulation and video generation, among other.

The tools you will learn to use is mainly Mentor’s Modelsim (for simulation), and Intels Quartus II (for synthesis, i.e. compiling VHDL code to the bitstream used by the FPGA).

Image of DE2-115 development board

Course Content

The course is organized in lectures, labs and a finally a project. You will also have some assignment works.

Lectures

During ten lectures, you will learn about VHDL, FPGAs, signal processing etc.

Assignments

After some of the lectures, you will get assignments (“home work”), that will help you reflect upon what was told during the lectures. The tasks in the assignments is developed to be relevant in the final project.

Laboratory Work

There are four labs in the course.

The Lab1 - Introduction, is mainly a tutorial, where you will learn how to use the tools.

In Lab2 - Keyboard, you will learn how to decode the PS/2 protocol, to read keystrokes from a keyboard.

In Lab3 - VGA, you will generate control signals for a VGA screen. There is an image stored in an SRAM, that you need to continuously read and send to the VGA. As a part of this, you will learn about pipelining.

In Lab4 - Audio, you will produce a hardware driver for “talking to” an external audio chip, via the protocol I2S. For this, you need to learn about the concept of samples, and how to translate them between bit serial and parallel. When done, you will enjoy the speakers saying “beep” and “boop”.

Project

The main part of the course is the project. In a project group with around six students, you will create a complete sound manipulating system.

The system shall be able to read sound from a sound source, and send it to a pair of speakers. On the way, it can modify the volume, and balance. Settings, such as volume, are read from a keyboard. The settings are displayed on the VGA screen.

Apart from this, there are different extensions to select between:

Course Material

All material, such as lecture slides, lab compendium etc, are provided via the platform Lisam, unless otherwise noted.

There are also two course books:

Note: You might need to be within the university network in order to access those.

The students can have access to the books in different ways:

Teachers