Digital Design Project

Aim

The course aim at both developing experience in implementing a larger digital design with stringent design requirements as well as understanding the back-end digital design flow. After successfully completing the course, the student can:

• Implement a larger digital design in a systematic way
• Apply knowledge from previous courses, search for supplementary knowledge, and find creative solutions
• Perform logic synthesis, place-and-route, as well as timing and power optimization and analysis
• Perform functional testing and performance estimation and verification both pre- and post-synthesis.

Content

The course cover all essential steps in the design and implementation of digital building blocks with stringent requirements. The building block specifications come either from research or industry. A top-down design-flow will be used, starting from the block specification, partitioning, algorithms, mapping to an architecture, and ending with a working implementation in either a standard cell design or an FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array). Especially, focus is on the back-end flow with synthesis and place-and-route and the impact on timing and power results.