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Engineering Online

ECE 720 Electronic System Level and Physical Design

3 Credit Hours

Study of transaction-level modeling of digital systems-on-chip using SystemC. Simulation and analysis of performance in systems with distributed control. Synthesis of digital hardware from high-level descriptions. Physical design methodologies, including placement, routing, clock-tree insertion, timing, and power analysis. Significant project to design a core at system and physical levels. Prerequisites: knowledge of Object-Oriented Programming with C++ and Register-Transfer-Level design with Verilog or VHDL.

Prerequisite

ECE 520 Digital ASIC Design.

Course Objectives

By the end of the course, the students will be able to:

  • Capture digital designs at the Transaction-Level and Electronic-System-Level of abstraction using SystemC
  • Determine through simulation the performance of a system that includes embedded micro-processors, Dynamic Random Access Memory, Buses, and Direct Memory Access Controlers.
  • Identify whether or not a SystemC description successfully models the behavior of a system
  • Use behavioral synthesis tools to determine the hardware implied by a portion of C++ code
  • Be able to execute a physical design and verification flow through the following steps:
    ◦ Floorplanning
    ◦ Placement
    ◦ Clock-Tree Synthesis
    ◦ Repeater Insertion
    ◦ Routing
    ◦ Static Timing Analysis
    ◦ Power Analysis
    ◦ Signal Integrity Analysis
    ◦ Power Grid Analysis
    ◦ Write simple Python scripts to analyze the output of ESL simulations and automate physical design tasks

Course Requirements

10 Homework assignments (50%)

Design Project (50%)

Textbook

No textbook required.

Computer and Internet Requirements

Students will need a relatively fast internet connection, because most of the work will be done using Linux remote-access through the Virtual Computing Laboratory, using X-Windows hosting software, such as X-Win32, which students can get from NCSU at no cost. If students have an internet connection that is fast enough to stream video lectures, then it should be sufficient.