ECE412 teaches students how to integrate software and hardware in modern microprocessor systems. It makes use of techniques and technology used in industry, and will provide students with a solid basis by which to interface, design, and program microprocessor systems. All of the course materials, lab projects, and lab equipment have been recently revised and updated to use modern technology.

The main task of the course is to complete four projects -- one that introduces the tools that will be used in the course, two that address different aspects of system design, and one that is left open-ended for the students to create whatever they will with the available equipment. Lecture material complements the labs, introducing concepts helpful to complete the projects and covering related areas. We encourage new ideas and suggestions to make the laboratory more interesting and useful. The lab is run in an open lab format: we issue you a key card which gains you access to the building and room anytime during normal school terms.

Below is what the department says about the class. You can see that the description is a bit out of date. Now we concentrate on system level interfacing, given a microprocessor system and some peripherals. Specifically, we provide a programmable Xilinx XUP 2VP30 board (with a Virtex Pro FPGA, ethernet, NTSC video encoder, VGA output, as well as USB, PS/2, serial and parallel interfaces). We run Linux on the PowerPC processors that are part of the Virtex II-Pro FPGAs on the XUP board, and implement hardware on the FPGAs that works with the PowerPCs to build a variety of systems. ECE 412's machine problems require both hardware design in VHDL and software programming in C in order to develop combined hardware-software systems.

Design, construction, and use of a small general purpose computer with a micro-processor CPU: MSI and LSI circuits used extensively; control panel, peripheral controllers, control logic, central processor, and programming experiments; and open lab format.

Prerequisite: ECE 385; ECE 390; or CS 232. Credit in ECE411 is recommended. 3 hours or 3/4 unit.

•         Quizzes: 20% (10% each)

•         Class Participation (5%)

•         Labs: 75%

–        MP1: 10%

–        MP2: 15%

–        MP3: 15%

–        MP4: 35%

•         Proposal/Initial Report: 20%

•         Final Project Presentation: 20%

•         Impact (usefulness, novelty, complexity): 30%

•         Demo/Final Report: 30%

•         MP1-MP3 Grading

–        Demo: 25%

–        Functionality: 40%

–        Report: 35%