Embedded system design

When/where:

Tuesdays: 11:00-13:00 INF-3 (theory)

Tuesdays: 13:00-15:00 INF-3 (practical works)

Material:

In this course we will provide you with a Gecko5Education FPGA-board that contains the Virtual prototype that we are going to work on. To be able to also work at home, you can take the board home.

Grading:

The grading scheme consists of:

• PW2: 15%
• PW4: 17.5%
• PW6: 17.5%
• Final project with presentation and demo: 50%

The final grade will be determined by:

FG = 1 + ROUND(result_in_% * 5 * 4)/4

Minimal requirements:

To be able to use the system you should have 2 USB ports.

As we also have a HDMI-output, we provide you with a hdmi-video-grabber that presents itself as a webcam to your laptop.

How to work:

All practical exercises will be performed in groups of 2 students. Bigger groups as 2 students are not allowed.

We provide all required software installed on the machines in INF-3, and on a VDI-images, however, it is also possible to install the software on your local machine (see below).

References:

• Fundamentals of System-on-Chip Design on Arm Cortex-M Microcontrollers
• Computer Architecture, John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson
• OpenRisc

Software:

• Your favorite code-editor (for example Visual Studio Code).
• A RS232 communication program (for example Cutecom for linux and Coolterm for Macos/Windows)
• The OpenRISC gcc-cross-compile toolchain (see below). Important: Use the one on this page, as it contains modifications that are not in the standard version!
• The ''convert_or32'' (see below) that you can compile with any c-compiler for your system.
• The open source OSS CAD Suite (see below).

The team:

• Theo Kluter (responsable) ties.kluter@epfl.ch
• Canberk Sönmez (TA) canberk.sonmez@epfl.ch

Questions and answers:

Of course during the course hours, but we also use an ED-discussion forum (see link below).

VDI-infrastructure:

You can connect with VMware Horizon (note: outside of the EPFL-network you need a VPN-connection) to vdi.epfl.ch.

For windows users:

The easiest way to use the tools on windows is to either:

1) Use a dual-boot system, or

2) Use wsl.

To use wsl (Windows-subsystem For Linux), use following instructions:

1) open a powershell as administrator

2) execute:

3) execute:

4) reboot your machine

5) open a powershell as administrator

6) install windows wsl with

7) follow the instructions here

8) reboot windows

9) open a wsl shell

10) open a powershell as administrator.

11) attach the Gecko5Education board to your computer

12) in the powershell type

13) Look for the BUSID for the device:

"0403:6010   USB Serial Converter A, USB Serial Converter B"

 

14) in the powershell type (where you replace BUSID by the info found in the previous step):

usbipd bind --force --busid BUSID

usbipd attach --wsl --busid BUSID

 

15) In your wsl window you should now see the Gecko5Education by typing

16) now you can continue with the instructions for linux in your wsl window