Weekly agenda

We have prepared this agenda to help you organize your weekly progress in this course. Each week lists the recommended material to study and the relevant exercises or tasks related to the embedded systems project.

Warning!

It is strongly recommended to follow this agenda already from the start. Otherwise, you risk falling behind and expose yourself to a unreasonably high workload towards the end of the semester.

Week 34: Getting started

• Material to study:

  • Content and learning objectives

  • Tools

  • Programmable logic devices

  • Field Programmable Gate Arrays

• Exercises:

  • Git

  • Quartus and ModelSim (Only relevant if you want to install the tools on your own computer)

  • EX1: Your first FPGA project

Week 35

• Material to study:

  • VHDL

  • History

  • Design units and structure

  • Objects and data types

  • Operators

  • Concurrent statements

• Exercises:

  • EX1: Your first FPGA project

  • EX2.A: 1-bit half adder

Week 36

• Material to study:

  • Design flow

  • Description styles

  • Testbenches

  • VHDL Process

  • Generic map

• Exercises

  • EX2.B: 1-bit full adder with simulation

  • EX2.C 4-bit full adder with simulation

  • EX3: 4-bit up-counter

Week 37

• Material to study:

  • Metastability and synchronization

  • State machines

• Exercises

  • EX3: 4-bit up-counter (if not already completed)

  • EX4: State machine

Week 38

• Material to study:

  • Packages and subprograms

  • Testbenches (Review the last part of the video covering the more advance aspects of test benches.)

• Project

  • Project overview

  • P1: UART controller – 1. part: TX module

Week 39

• Material to study:

  • Embedded systems

  • Nios II CPU

  • Soft core

  • Hardware Abstraction Layer

• Exercises:

  • EX5: A basic Nios II system

• Project

  • P1: UART controller – 2. part: RX module

Week 40

• Material to study:

  • Memory mapped interfaces

• Exercises

  • EX6: Accessing Nios II memory mapped modules

• Project

  • P1: UART controller – 3. part: Processor interface

Week 41

• Material to study:

  • Interrupt handling

• Exercises

  • EX7: Nios II interrupt handling

• Project

  • P2: Microcontroller system

Week 42

• Material to study:

  • Review previous material

• Project

  • P2: Microcontroller system

Week 43

• Material to study:

  • RTOS

• Exercises

• Project

  • P2: Microcontroller system

Week 44

• Material to study:

  • Scheduling and task management

  • Latency & jitter

• Exercises

  • EX8: A basic RTOS application

• Project

  • P3: RTOS

Week 45

• Material to study:

  • Intertask communication

  • Semaphores

  • Messages

• Exercises

  • EX9: Semaphore example

• Project

  • P3: RTOS

Week 46

• Material to study:

  • Review previous material

• Project

  • P3: RTOS

Week 47

• Review all course material