FPGA design for communication systems

• Understand fundamental problems in Broadband Electronics development
• Develop a block level specification (group work)
• Implement a specification in VHDL/Verilog
• Write efficient VHDL/Verilog code for communication applications
• Perform functional simulation of implemented design
• Perform synthesis and verification
• Use optimisation tools
• Write a technical report documenting the project
• Carry through a structured development process for an engineering project
• Evaluate and provide constructive criticism for others’ work

Survey of high-speed electronic design principles in digital communication systems. VHDL coding styles, FPGA architectures, parallel design, pipelining, memory control, scheduling, error detection, clock and data synchronisation. Hardware architectures and performance of telecommunications and data communication switch systems. Examples from recent or ongoing research. The student projects include high-speed design by use of VHDL (Very high-speed integrated circuits Hardware Description Language) based FPGA design tools.

02139/34310

Seminars, exercises and design tasks