Intro to Digital Design - An End to End Approach

This is a five-week course, with 30 hours of lectures. We expect the following prior knowledge from the students:

  • Converting a number between decimal, binary and hexadecimal representations

  • Basic knowledge on logical operations (AND, OR, NAND, XOR) and truth tables

  • Familiarity with any programming language (Python, C…etc.)

Why take this course?

Digital design is both an art and a craft. This course is meant to give you a first taste of both. Along the way, you will experience the joy of designing real digital circuits and the challenge of making them work.

It is the first step in your digital design journey towards more advanced courses at the university, bigger projects, and eventually the many career paths in one of today’s most exciting and in-demand areas of technology.

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Learning Outcomes

The following will be taught through will be introduced through increasing complexity, inspired by real digital systems. The examples are listed here.

Digital Design concepts

  • Decomposing boolean functions into gates

  • Combinational, Sequential elements

  • Finite State Machines

  • AXI-Stream protocol - Ready/valid handshake

  • UART protocol - Make your circuit talk to your PC

  • Setup time, hold time, critical path, retiming

SystemVerilog for Design

  • Parametrization, hierarchical design

  • always_ff, always_comb, logic,

  • generate for, if, case, function, packed arrays

  • 3 procedure coding style of FSMs

  • Wrapping SystemVerilog in old Verilog

SystemVerilog for Verification

  • basic tbs, function, task, queues

  • randomizing with constraints,

  • transactional tbs: simple driver/monitor, basic OOP

Forbidden in this Course: Keywords & Features of SystemVerilog

reg, wire, assign, always, unpacked arrays

SystemVerilog/Verilog is one of the most complex languages ever, with a lot of historical baggage and countless footguns. To avoid wasting our limited time in debating those, we will avoid the above. However, I will create a page here explaining each of their use in detail for the sake of completion.

Final Projects

  • FIR Filter on FPGA to extract bass/treble from your favorite song - A Worked example gradually built through our lectures and discussions

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  • A fully-parallel neural network accelerator on FPGA to classify handwritten numbers - The project you will gradually build as a series of guided assignments

    • Simple fixed-point quantization and ReLU: Week 2 - Combinational Circuits Assignment

    • Adder Tree, Vector Multiply-Adder: Week 3 - Sequential Circuits Assignment

    • Fully-parallel dense layer, neural network, AXI-Stream: Week 4 - Practical Circuits Assignment

    • Full system on FPGA with UART RX & TX, Python serial to send/receive input/outputs: Week 5 - FIR Filter Example Project

Course Material