Digital Design 2

Lectures (one lecture every week):

Week 1: Quick review of combinational and sequential networks, binary arithmetic, binary multiplication. Separation of control and datapaths.

Week 2: Organization of a general purpose control unit: the ALU, Program counter, instruction decoder, register file, instruction memory, data memory. Case study: designing a simple number sequencing CPU (3 instructions)

Week 3: Three state signals, time multiplexing of data wires. Busses and bus systems (control, data and address busses). Extending the memory interface. Separate I/O and memory busses.

Week 4: Simple memory types (RAM, ROM, FLASH). Memory interfacing to an actual bus system (as an example the Microchip PIC24F family’s EPMP bus is used).

Week 5: Introduction of an actual commercial microcontroller: CPU core and instruction set, power requirements, reset and clocking. (as an example, the Microchip PIC24F core is used, the actual device used in labs will be the PIC24JF256GA705)

Week 6: Introduction to he programming model of the PIC24: Registers, instruction encoding, address modes. Arithmetic and logical instructions, condition flags, conditional jumps.

Week 7: Indirect addressing and stack. Pointers, subroutines, parameter passing to subroutines. (Mainly in assembly, with some references to C)

Week 8: Interrupt handling, context save and restore. Nested interrupts, interrupt priorities. Implementing a simple software based delay, and its problems.

Week 9: Introduction to common microcontroller peripherals through the example of a timer, and common timer based peripherals (input capture, output compare, PWM).

Week 10: Communication related peripherals (UART, SPI).

Week 11: Organization and handling of simple communication buffers, an example for setup and interrupt based usage of the PIC24F’s buffered UART.

Week 12: Introduction to bus arbitration and DMA. Overview of the PIC24F’s DMA capabilities.

Week 13: Specialties of modern memory types: NVRAM, FRAM, MRAM, DRAM, DDRAM, NAND and NOR FLASH.

Week 14: Quick overview of programmable logical devices: PAL, GAL, CPLD, FPGA, the PIC24F’s CLC peripheral.

 Practices (one practice every two weeks):

1: Logic levels and logic level conversion, open collector buffers. Implementing simple logical functions usint only open collector outputs.

2: Simple design tasks based on arithmetic, comparators, multiplexers and counters.

3: Memory interfacing to a bus system.

4: Basic assembly programming: formula evaluation, simple loops, counting problem.

5: Basic assembly programming: subroutines, functions, lookup tables, data conversion.

6: IO handling, button debouncing, writing a simple embedded control program in assembly.

7: Practicing common exam problems

Labs (3 times 3 hour lab practices in total):

1: Hands-on practice in a microcontroller development environment (MPLAB X). Trace and debug functions. Debugging and tracing a simple C and assembly program.

2: IO port handling, edge detection, output pulse generation. Filling an external shift register using bit-banged IO (a shift register based LED display is used on the dev board).

3: Complex microcontroller based program, using IO ports, timers and SPI peripheral. (implementing a stopwatch)