New VLSI Project

I spent some time thinking of a possible new design that might be suitable for the new VLSI project. As the students work in pairs, it would be easiest to get them to design some sort of communications device, with one designing the transmitter and the other the receiver. Then, they can put it all together at the end to see if it works. However, I have to keep in mind that most of these students would have had little exposure to hardware design, much less a VLSI one. This means that the project needs to be suitably easy for noobs, but is also extensible for the experienced few.

For this, I looked at some of the available open source designs on OpenCores and also some of the application notes from Xilinx. There is plenty of information out there, which is good. If we use examples from the Xilinx AppNotes, they come with some basic background info, which can be used for the handout. As it is quite often easier to design the transmitter than the receiver, I thought that we’ll just do this design for them. We can get the students to design the higher level parts of the stack.

DMH wants to keep the ring oscillator as part of the new design. This is simple enough to do as we can just use that as the internal clock source. To make things interesting, we could spec it so that the students either design different clocks for the RX and TX or use different phases of the clock for the RX and TX. Keeping this in mind, I came up with an idea for a simple communication project for the students.

General Project Idea

• We spec different clocks for the receiver and transmitter that are non divisible by each other (e.g. 2MHz and 3MHz).
• We provide complete physical layer designs, conforming to a standard protocol (e.g. RS232/SPI/I2C…).
• We get them to complete the encoder/decoder. We provide them with partial code.
• We get them to design an error detection scheme. This can be as robust as they want (e.g. Parity/CRC/Hamming…).

Assuming that the toolchain works automagically with the design kits, they can finish the front-end design in under 2 weeks, which leaves another 2 weeks for the back-end work. 2 weeks for the back-end work should be enough if the design kits work properly. The back-end work will involve substituting a single custom logic gate into the design and then putting the whole design through the automated tools.