ELEC 464 Course Information

ELEC 464 : Microcomputer System Design

Instructor

Ed Casas. I am normally on campus only during lectures, tutorials and office hours. The best way to contact me at other times is by e-mail: edc@ece.ubc.ca.

Lectures

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:30 to 11:30 am. MCLD 202. Lectures start September 3 and end November 29.

Lecture Notes

Detailed notes will be distributed before the relevant lecture. The notes will often contain short exercises or missing parts that will be completed during the lecture.

If you would like to pick up copies for other students please wait until the end of the lecture to make sure there are enough copies. You can always print out extra copies from the course's Web page (see below).

Office Hours

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30 -- 1:30 in MCLD 155.

Tutorials

Fridays 3:30 -- 4:30 pm. The tutorials will be used to review difficult lecture material and to solve problems from the assignments.

Teaching Assistants

Ayman El-Nagar (aymane@ece.ubc.ca) and Anwar Elfeitori (anware@ece.ubc.ca) will alternate in marking the assignments and may run some tutorials.

Web Page

Students should check the course Web page (http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~elec464) regularly for announcements about the course. You can read these Web pages using the text browser (lynx) which is available through Netinfo. Copies of the lecture notes, assignments, etc will also be available in various formats.

Newsgroup

You are encouraged to use the newsgroup ubc.courses.elec.464 to post questions or comments about the course. The TAs will monitor the newsgroup and answer questions related to the assignments.

Intended Audience

Students who will design systems that include digital electronics.

Prerequisites

Student should have experience in the design of simple digital circuits and have done some machine language programming using a microprocessor.

Text

We will not use a textbook in this course. Concepts will be explained in the lecture notes and we will use manufacturers' data sheets and standards documents as examples and reference material. I hope this will give you a better introduction to the design process than using a textbook.

Other References

The Indispensable PC Hardware Book, second edition, by Hans-Peter Messmer (Addison-Wesley, 1995, C$52) is a detailed reference on the IBM PC Architecture.

VHDL for Logic Synthesis: An Introductory Guide for Achieving Design Requirements by Andrew Rushton (McGraw-Hill, 1996, US$55) is a good text on logic synthesis using VHDL. The Synopsys VHDL Compiler Reference Manual (available in the VLSI lab) is also a good reference on synthesis with VHDL. These books cover much more than you will need for this course. A number of tutorials and a short book on VHDL are available on the net (see the course Web page).

The Art of Electronics, second edition, by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill, Cambridge University Press, 1989, is a good practical reference book on most aspects of electronics.

Assignments

An assignment will be given out each week. Solutions will be given out for all questions but not all questions will be marked. Late assignments will be given a mark of zero.

Assignments are to be done individually. Students are encouraged to seek help from classmates but copying is not allowed. Possible penalties include a mark of zero for all assignments.

Evaluation

There will be a one-hour mid-term examination in late October (date TBD). The final mark will be calculated as follows:

	final exam  	60%
	midterm exam 	30%
	assignments 	10%

Objectives

By the end of the course the student should have the background required to begin designing microprocessor-based systems using standard ICs. In general, the student should be able to:

design simple combinational and sequential circuits using the synthesis subset of VHDL covered in the course
describe the response of a circuit described in VHDL to a given input
describe in detail the 8088 processor bus and the behaviour of its signals during read and write cycles
describe in detail the response of an 8088 processor to an interrupt
compute timing margins for read and write cycles from CPU and memory timing specifications
design multi-chip memory banks that meet bus loading and timing requirements using common memory ICs (SRAM, DRAM, EPROM)
select and justify the choice of I/O strategy (polled, interrupt, or DMA) for a given application
write software to control programmable peripheral chips (e.g. DMA, interrupt controller, timer/counter, parallel and serial interfaces) in 8088 assembly language
describe and analyze the behaviour of SCSI and RS-232 bus signals during common operations

Detailed objectives will be provided in the introduction to each set of lecture notes.

Course Outline

The course is structured in a bottom-up order: digital logic circuits, the processor bus, the system bus, and peripheral interfaces. As examples we will use the Xilinx 4000 FPGA, the Intel 8088 CPU, the ISA bus and RS-232 and SCSI interfaces.

review of digital logic design
logic synthesis with VHDL
the 8088 microprocessor
memory system design
polled, interrupt-driven and DMA interfaces
system buses
peripheral buses

Related Courses

This course deals with the hardware design of computers using microprocessors. Related topics that are not covered in this course include:

microprocessor CPU design is covered in ELEC 476.
IC design is covered in ELEC 479.
general digital system design is not currently taught.
operating systems are covered in CPSC 415 or ELEC 494.
analog/digital interfaces are covered in ELEC 472.

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