Advanced System on Chip Design Education Kit

Course Aim

To produce students who can design, implement, and test an Arm Cortex-A-based SoCs on real FPGA hardware using high-level functional specifications, standard hardware description and software programming languages.

Learning Outcomes

• Knowledge and understanding of:
  • The properties of a System on Chip, and its design flow.
  • The operations of Armv7-A Assembly various data transfer and data processing instruction types.
  • The operations of Armv7-A Assembly various conditional, branching, and miscellaneous instruction types.
  • The microarchitecture properties and characteristics of the Cortex-A9 processor.
  • The operation of the AMBA AXI4 Bus Architecture.
  • The signals and operation of an example AXI4-Stream HDMI input peripheral.
  • The function and typical components and interfaces in an Arm debugging system.
• Intellectual
  • Describe the properties of Armv7-A architecture and the Cortex-A9 processor.
  • Explain the operation of GPIO, memory access and controllers, and various memory types in a typical SoC.
  • Explain the operation of various communication types, UART, and AXI-4 Stream.
  • Describe the HDMI interfaces and mechanism.
  • Explain the operation and mechanism of a simple edge detection image-processing application.
  • Describe the purpose of SIMD and usage of Arm Neon technology for accelerating image processing.
  • Describe the purpose and implementation of hardware acceleration.
• Practical
  • Ability to use commercial tools to develop Arm-based SoCs
  • Demonstrate how to program an Arm processor on a Fixed Virtual Platform using a mixture of Assembly language and C code.
  • Configure and implement AXI-Lite peripheral to control General Purpose Input and Output Ports (GPIOs).
  • Configure and implement an AXI4-Stream HDMI peripheral to display a simple colored image onto an HDMI monitor.

Syllabus