Term Project

Project Topic

For your term project you are to choose an interesting digital system, perform some preliminary "research" or a literature survey, design the system in VHDL, synthesize it, and gather statistics. The following list represents typical digital systems and associated projects that have been explored by previous groups. However, you are discouraged from implementing yet-another-DCT-encoder or DES encryption module, unless your design offers an interesting new twist, as these projects have been done to death.

The project compendium, distributed in class, offers several examples of project topics as well as an illustration of what you are expected to produce in terms of the project report. Some general ideas include:

1. Error detecting-correcting modules. Some of the more advanced n-out-of-m error correcting codes (other than the Hamming codes) would be very interesting topics.
2. Various communication network protocols including ATM, SONET, Ethernet, FDDI, DBDQ, IBM token ring, high speed serial links or any recent development.
3. Digital neural networks and fuzzy logic systems to recognize patterns or perform processing.
4. A digital system including MPEG, JPEG, speech/image or video compression and decompression systems, etc. Voice sub-band coding is one example; it can compress a 64 Kbit/s voice stream to about 8Kbit/s.
5. RISC CPU, DSP and computer subsystems, for example, cache controller, schedulers, PCI bus interface.
6. A hardware encryption/decryption units. The RSA, PGP, DES, and Blowfish algorithms are currently among the most popular (although perhaps too popular).
7. Fast designs for performing computer arithmetic algorithms, i.e., multiplication, division, square roots etc., including transform function such as FFT, DCT, and Hadamard Transform.
8. Image processing systems: hardware to perform image manipulations, i.e. moving the view to the left or right, zooming in or out, rendering, hidden line removal, etc. The fields of computer graphics or Virtual Reality are full of interesting things to do with images.
9. Any interesting system you can think of. Search the FPGA manufacturer's "Application Notes" to get good ideas, and discussions of how to implement the systems on FPGA. You can implement a system or sub-system that is described in an Altera or Xilinx Application Note. Proceedings of the Canadian Conference on Programmable Logic Devices describe some of the research projects undertaken at other universities. There are also international conferences on the subject, which can give you further ideas.
10. You can also construct smaller sub-systems of a larger system. For example, MPEG and JPEG compression systems often use 8x8 Discrete Cosine Transforms and many groups have simply implemented the DCT element as a sub-system of the MPEG/JPEG system.
11. FPGAs have been proposed for use in DNA pattern matchers, where they apparently outperform supercomputers. They have been proposed in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) medical machines, where they perform digital signal processing to create a 3D image of the human brain.

Deliverables

Your project will be broken down into several phases, beginning with a draft abstract and project pitch, proceeding through two milestone presentations, and at the end of term, a longer project presentation accompanied by submission of the final report and a project presentation. These phases are described in further detail below:

• Project Pitch and Draft Abstract: A three-minute project proposal in which your group outlines the basic idea of your project, the motivation for this work, and a brief summary of the literature survey you have conducted on the topic. You will receive feedback regarding your delivery and technical content that will help you improve for subsequent presentations. Note that you may not proceed with a topic until you have satisfied this requirement.
• Project Abstract: A brief, well-written technical abstract, providing an overview of your project plans at an early stage of development. This should include the background and movitation for your work, a description of the basic design approach, planned methods of evaluation, and a number of suitable references. A Gantt chart is also strongly encouraged to demonstrate that your group has considered issues of project management.
• Milestone Presentations: A five-minute oral presentation describing your progress in acheiving milestone objectives, as well as an outline of remaining work needing to be completed.
• Project Report and Presentation: A self-contained technical paper describing your project, accompanied by an end-of-term presentation, illustrating what you have achieved in your work. The paper must adhere to the described publication guidelines and it should reinforce the content of your presentation.

  Submission of your paper and accompanying source code should be made via the course Moodle.

Suggestions

• You are welcome to build upon what the previous projects in 487 or 494 have done, but as in any publication you must look up and reference any related prior materials and you must clearly explain you contributions.
• See "Application Notes" provided by manufacturers such as Altera, Xilinx, Actel, QuickLogic, for ideas. Application notes usually target exciting, innovative and relevant designs, as we have listed above, and are usually provided on their web sites. The notes also describe how the designs can be implemented in FPGAs. Hence, these provide an excellent start - they usually have excellent topics, and they provide descriptions of how to implement the designs on FPGAs.
• See any recent conference proceedings on Programmable Logic Devices, Field Programmable Gate Arrays, Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), etc. These proceedings are full of papers describing what engineers in academia and industry are developing. Take note of how they organize and present their work.
• For a paper to be successful it must convey technical information in a concise and well organized manner. Useful information includes: how many gates does the design require according to analysis, how many gates does it require when synthesized, how did you partition the design to implement it on chip, how did you compile it, how fast can you clock it, what suggestions do you have for others, etc.
• We have been receiving many requests from local industry for EE. graduates skilled in VHDL, computer architecture and digital switching. If you write a good paper for the 487 Laboratory, you might want to show it to prospective employers.
• Don't pick a very difficult project topic. Try to select a topic which will allow you to build the system and simulate it in VHDL. If you are not sure about the topics, please come and see us.

Last updated on 26 March 2017
by Jeremy Cooperstock