What's New in Computer Science?

July 25, 2006 (Summer 2005 - Spring 2006)

CS152A (2 units) and CS152B (4 units) are laboratory courses for undergraduate students in CS and EE departments. These two courses have been entirely re-designed and the labs been equipped with new tools and instruments during the summer of 2005.

CS152A is intended to give students experience with logic design and cad tools. In this lab, a series of lab experiments start with easy designs allowing students to familiarize themselves with the lab equipment and CAD tools. They culminate in fairly complex designs that the students must create and implement. Students use discrete components and debugging equipment. Afterwards, students use CAD tools from Xilinx and Mentor Graphics and implement their design on Xilinx Spartan3 FPGA boards.

CS152B is designed to provide hands-on experience in digital design. Currently the major application domain used as an example is implementing image and video processing applications on FPGA. Furthermore, students review design techniques learned from theory of computer architecture in CS151A. Students are exposed to CAD tools from Xilinx and Mentor Graphics and implement their design on Xilinx VirtexIIPro FPGA board.

Each of the assignments/projects requires students to design schematic or VHDL hardware designs and then to analyze and test them for correctness using simulation tools as well as actual FPGA hardware. In the final project of the class (image processing algorithm on FPGA), they are requested to design their own method to test the functionality of each component of their designs by interpreting output data of their modules for test inputs.

Previous What's New in CS Info

August 3, 2005

1. CS152A Introductory Digital Design Laboratory
   This lab entails practical study and design of simple logic gates, combinational logic circuits (adders, multiplexers, decoders, etc.), memory elements (flip-flops), and sequential logic circuits (state machines). In this lab, students gain logic design skills. At the end, they will be able to build, test and use their own logic circuits. For this purpose, we have equipped the lab with a large number new set of discrete digital ICs. Each station is equipped with an oscilloscope and a true RMS multimeter for debugging and monitoring purposes. Logic designs will be done using computer-aided design (CAD) tools and implemented using discrete elements and Field-Programmable Gate Array devices (FPGA). Spata3 starter boards have been purchased as for Programmable Logic circuits.
2. CS152B Digital Design Project Laboratory
   This course provides students with opportunity to practically employ and implement their knowledge from Computer Architecture courses. They will be requested to design and implement challenging projects on Programmable Logics. In the new proposed projects, students will design and implement image processing/multimedia applications on FPGA using CAD tools. Students will be introduced to VHDL and Xilinx ISE CAD tools. The lab is supplied with the XUP Virtex-II PRO "Curriculum on a Chip" development systems along with 256Mbytes DDR DRAM. For image and video capturing, student will use Genwac Y/C 1/3" DSP color cameras and ClearPTZ surveillance camera bundles. Furthermore, these cameras are equipped with pan-tilts which enhance the performance of the system. Sensors will be integrated in the projects to make them more interesting. Wireless sensor nodes, mica2dots, will perform sensing and environmental data collection. For monitoring purposes each group is provided with a VDEC1 video decoder board to enable displaying images on an external monitor. Also, GW 2.5 LCD monitors will be used for debugging and performance evaluation purposes.