The goal of this aspect of the class is to document your work in a way that is suitable for publication or public presentation. The final documents should look like an IEEE conference or journal paper or presentation. Duplication of work should be avoided! The proposal and reports should build upon each other incrementally until the final report is done. This reporting is not a substitute for a good lab notebook.

Team and Project Proposal - 2 points

A proposal not exceeding one page that outlines your project, including:
• Topic and team members
• Scope of the project, design approach, and estimate of design size
• Estimated tasks and milestones with completion dates.

The first design review consist of a written report and a five minute "elevator speech" describing your term project. The design must be well understood and specified at this point, and include the golden model, a block level description of the design, the test and validation environment, and general floor plan. Initial behavioral descriptions should be included. Thus, the report should include:
• Introduction and motivation of the project.
• Research aspect, and prior art and sources.
• Block level design and description of the project. Include pertinent information such as instruction set, algorithms, protocols, etc.
• Description of Golden Model.
• General design information, including chip area, performance, and power estimates.
• Interfaces and verification environment.
• DFT (Design for Test) aspects of the design.
• Tasks and milestones with completion dates and team member responsibilities.

This review will consist of a written report and a 5-10 minute presentation. At this stage, you should have completed the behavioral description and validated it against your golden model. Module level design and synthesis should be complete with back annotation and place and route of the block internals. This report should include substantial detail of the design of the modules, including:
• Synthesis results
• Verification results
• DFT methodology and results
• Converging design area, power, and performance estimates, with a comparison to your initial estimates.
• Interfacing and physical design issues.
• Task and milestone review and plan for finishing design.

You will hand in a written report and give a 10-15 minute presentation at the end of the semester. The final design review should contain a complete description of the project in the format for the Design Automation Conference design contest or article. This should be a compendium of the work in the previous two design reviews, plus the following:
• Integration, global placement and route, LVS, DRC and validation of the design.
• Simulated results of your design project, including area, performance and power of the design.
• Analysis of the quality of the results, and comparison to other designs if applicable.
• Technical content and results meets the proposed goals and targets

Presentations and written documents will be graded as follows:

Last Modified: