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EECS 150 Components and Design Techniques for Digital Systems     λ beef
EECS 150 Fall 2005

MW 1:00-2:30PM
306 Soda Hall
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Old News

To all 150 Students:

You have finished the last part of this course. Hopefully you feel a sense of accomplishment and pride. This semester turned out to be very strong. We had some spectacular designs with great execution. In the course of 6-7 weeks you have designed and implemented almost every major component to a basic gaming system. Hopefully, you learned how to approach problems of this magnitude and depth. I hope your semester was as fun for you as a student as it was for me as a GSI.

Warmly,
Jack Tzeng


12-17-2005

Congratulations on surviving cs150!
If you didn't get a chance to pick up your report, send me an e-mail. I'll be around until Tuesday. All your grades, except your final exam grade, should be online now. We plan to grade your finals tomorrow. Good luck on your remaining finals.

If you left files that you still want on your U:\, make sure you get them off soon. Your account will be deleted soon after the semester ends. Also, if you don't collect your graded assignments, they will be discarded as well.
Good luck on the final!

12-16-2005

Review session update:
Sorry guys, I misapprehended question 3, the user control problem. When the question asks for a state machine diagram, we want the full bubble-and-arc diagram. This means labeling the initial state, all the transitions, and all the outputs. For this problem, since you'll be generating the necessary control signals for your particular datapath, it is likely your implementation will be different than everyone else's. If you feel your diagrams don't adequetely describe your design, you may need to have some textual explaination. Sorry if I caused any confusion.

Things to bring to the Final:
a. At least 2 blue books( I will not bring any extra, if you forget you will have to go out and buy 2).
b. Some Pencils
c. Any notes you want + Text Book( not that it will help you)
d. An English dictionary
e. Eraser
f. No cell phone
g. No silicon devices of any kind
h. No mini-pokai to tell you the anwsers

12-13-2005

A review session will be held in 125 Cory on Tuesday, 12/13 from 4:00-5:30pm. We will be going over the solutions to Professor Katz's Fall 2000 final. Read the exam before coming to review. We will not be doing problem 1.

You will get your project grade including your report grade when you turn in your final on exam day. Midterm II regrades have been done. Grades for those should be posted soon.

By the way, you guys need to stop e-mailing me about quiz6. Was the semester that long ago that Geek, Dweeb, and Nerd have been forgotten?

12-9-2005

Congratulations to those who finished the projects. Now is the time to check your homework, quiz, lab, and checkpoint grades. We will be assigning letter grades as soon as the final exams are graded. The online grade book should be up to date except for midterm II regrades, project grades (final checkoff, extra credit, and report), hw10, quiz10, and final exam. If you believe a grade is incorrectly recorded, please let us know.

12-5-2005

What to bring to your Oral Defense(during your lab time this week/ next week)
0. Sign up for Early/Regular checkoff before your lab section.
1. Bring your Remote Control - you will be turning it in.
2. Bring your Partner.

11-21-2005

Reminder, we just want the files we need, and only the files we need to compile your project in the project submission folder. This means, we want all your verilog files (excluding testbenches), including our register.v, counter.v, etc. if you used them. This also means no bit files, no zip files, no vsd files, and no mp3 files. And again, no blackboxes of your own; we need to be able to see your code.

Clean up your submisssion directory or you will lose points.



Update:
We will also allow a single 'readme.txt' file. This is not required, although if you have some interesting features hidden via some combination of buttons or dip switches it may help us to know them. For example, you might want to list the button assignments on the controller. Eg. A: Paint, B: Erase, Z: Paint the Mona Lisa.

11-22-2005



Don't forget to sign up for the oral defense early/late check off spot in Lab(125 Cory). You must sign up by monday 11/28/05. The sign up sheet is located at the TA station. Both you and your partner must be present for the oral defense. If your particular lab section runs out of "early" check off slots, just fill up the regular checkoff slots but mark a note that it's EARLY. You will still get early extra credit if you submitted your code on time and you tell us. Your checkpoint 4 must work PERFECTLY if you want the early extra credit. NO extra credit of any kind will be given to projects which still have masking problems, cursor issues, sync problems ect.
!!REMEMBER: You must get a time slot during your official lab section.!!

11-21-2005



Brian will not be available for office hours today, Nov 21st, from 4-5PM. He will be holding office hours from 5-6PM instead.

11-20-2005



If you have questions about the Oral Defense of your project, please check the news group post Entitled: Oral Defense and Final Project Submission

11-20-2005



2 Things:
A. Labs next week 11/22-11/24 will be canceled, but don't forget to submit your projects on time if you want to go for early check off. For early check off, the code is due at 10am, but you do not have to be present; final check off will be after Thanksgiving. Enjoy your turkey.

B. There have been some questions about using TA solution code from Checkpoint 1 and 2 during final Check off.
i. If you want to go for early check off, you may NOT use solution code form Checkpoint 1 and Checkpoint 2. End to end, early check off must be your own code.
ii. If you want to go for regular check off, you will lose points for using checkpoint 1 and 2 solution code.
We want you guys to be able to say that this project is entirely your own, the code was provided only as an example.

11-18-2005



There will be no lab lecture this Friday, November the 18th. Make sure to read the new document on the report writeup. Enjoy your weekend and good luck on the project.

Due to Thanksgiving weekend, exam regrade requests due date will be extended to Monday, Novemeber 28th at 1:00pm.

11-16-2005



Midterm II's have been graded and your grades have been posted. The mean was a 29.1 with the SD being 8.2; the max was a 43.5. You can ask for your exams during your discussion section. Check the syllabus for the regrade policy.

The description for the project writeup has been posted. Please take a look before the day it is due. It might also be helpful to start working on portions of it as you finish the checkpoints while everything is still fresh in your memory.

If you are planning to implement an extra function that is not on the official extra credit list, you will have to submit a proposal to Po-kai. The half to one page (informal) proposal will involve an outline of what the feature is, what needs to be done, and a plan of how your team is going to make it work. Hopefully, doing the proposal will help your team understand what is involved. We will also use it to assign the amount of extra credit. Obviously, the extra credit amount will be proportional to the amount of extra (functioning) work done. The due date for this proposal is 11/21 at 10:00am in Po-kai's inbox.
So far, some new features include saving / loading from an usb memory drive, transparent / alpha-blending cursor, and copy / pasting sections of canvas.

11-14-2005



Bryan's OH on Tuesday 11/15 will be canceled. Please plan on going to other TA's OH if you have questions.

11-13-2005




Solution Code for Checkpoint 3 will NOT be released. You must complete it before moving on to Checkpoint 4. If you're having problems, don't be afraid to ask other groups for help, by now they understand the ins and outs of SDRAM. There are plenty of resources for you.

11-10-2005



Brian's midterm 2 review notes is available here.

11-8-2005



David's example from the MT2 review is available here. Look at Lecture 17 notes from Spring '05 semester for coverage on creating larger memories from smaller ones.

11-7-2005



The second midterm is going to be in 125 Cory (in lab) on 11/9 at 1:00 PM. Please arrive early to be sitted.

11-4-2005



We have created a shared folder in your U:\ drives based on your partner assignments in our gradebook. Make sure if you put a file in there, both you and your partner can see it and vice versa. You will submit your final project in this folder so make sure it works.

10-31-2005



Let's be clear:
Checkpoint 2 is due during your lab section 10/25/05-10/28/05
No ONE will receive partial credit for a late checkoff after their lab section
This is a hard deadline.
If you are still on checkpoint 1... you are behind, forget about checkpoint 1, it's not worth your time at this point. Move on to checkpoint 2. We will be releasing solution code soon.

10-25-2005



Good news! We have decided to reduce the load on Checkpoint 3. In order to pass checkpoint 3 you no longer need to make the cursor appear on the screen. We'll be using the same black box "Checkpoint4.v", but you can simply ignore the outputs from the paint engine that have to deal with the Cursor/Color. A few things to remember:
1. You still need to plug in a remote controller/ use your checkpoint1. ( See demoSolution Readme)
2. When you hit reset, nothing will appear on the screen until you paint something.
3. The cursor is not a requirement for checkpoint 3, so don't bother with it for now, you have enough to deal with in SDRAM. Worry about the cursor for checkpoint 4.

10-22-2005



A few things have been posted, look to your right to see recent updates. Figure 1 of Checkpoint3 has been modified slightly to account for this semester. For those of you who did not go to lab lecture:
1.you MUST have timing diagrams to pass check point 3 design review.
2.YOU must have timing diagrams to pass check point 3 design review.
3.you must have TIMING diagrams to pass check point 3 design review.

10-21-2005



Lab Lecture 8-SDRAM is now posted:
1. Feel free to look at it early if you want tips on how to plan out your design of Checkpoint 3.
2. I put in some extra slides in the back that describe how to read timing diagrams.
3. I made these slides more descriptive so that you can read them on your own if we don't get to them in time.
4. You will need to learn how to read diagrams to pass this design review and complete this checkpoint.

10-18-2005



A summary of the due date of each section of the project can be found here.

10-16-2005



Jack Tzeng will no longer be having office hours from 12-1 on Tuesdays; do not plan on him staying after his lab from 9-12:00.

10-14-2005



The percentage breakdown for each portion of the project has been posted on the syllabus page. Notice there is a final report for the project worth 20%. Do not throw away your design reviews; you will most likely need them for the report.

10-13-2005



This is a list of all the students whom we do not have a group name for the project: No Group Name. If you do not have a group name, we do not know who your partner is and you will not receive credit for checkpoint 1. Decide on a name between you and your partner and give it to your TA during lab. Group names must be finalized by Friday. If you do not have a partner, find someone on this list, or post to the news group.

10-10-2005



The design review procedure has been updated. We forgot to mention that you should make a copy of your design so you have something to work with while we grade your design.

10-9-2005



In addition to the standard checkoffs for the project checkpoints, we will be doing design reviews. Read this for more information. Here are two sample design reviews from last semester: 1 and 2. Note, it is important to really spend time to work out and understand your design; the reviews are worth 40% of your checkpoint grade.

10-6-2005



We will be passing out remote controls to project groups this week in lab. Both people need to be present. If you still do not have a partner by Thursday, come to lab lecture on Friday, we will be creating groups.

10-5-2005



In Lab 5 Part 2, the new version of Chipscope has a different GUI which can cause an error when using Chipscope. In Part 4.2.1-4 of the lab, when generating the ILA, create the ILA as you normally would, however, in the second screen, there is an option "ILA Storage Qualifications Condition Settings". Uncheck this box and generate the core. This should fix the triggering problem.
-Jack Tzeng

10-4-2005



You can remotely access the Xilinx tools over Remote Desktop connection. The server is kramnik.eecs.berkeley.edu; use your cs150 computer accounts to connect. A guide with step-by-step instructions on how to set up RDC can be found here.

10-2-2005



If you have a midterm regrade request, you have until next Friday (10/7) at 2:10 pm. Drop your midterm with your written request in the homework box before next Friday's lab lecture.
Check the syllabus for the regrade policy.

9-29-2005



Midterm I has been graded. The grades are available online. The mean is 47 out of 50. Good job! You can picked up your graded exams during section this week.

9-28-2005



Lab4.zip has been updated with a new Const.v( lab 4 part 2), please re-download it to get the latest version

9-27-2005



Midterm I review session will be held in 125 Cory on 9/26 from 5:00-6:00 pm. Prepare by bringing questions.

9-24-2005



Sample midterms:

9-23-2005



The first midterm is going to be in 125 Cory (in lab) on 9/28 at 1:00 PM. Please arrive early to be sitted.

9-22-2005



The verilog files for the lab and project files are now password protected. Use your web username / password to login.

9-19-2005



9-19-2005



9-18-2005



Web Cast:
Web casting is now available for lab lectures 1 and 2 on the calendar page.
1. They are only viewable using Internet Explorer
2. Lab Lecture 2 does not have slides associated with it, slides are available on the course calendar page
3. Future Lab Lectures may or may not be webcast

9-15-2005



Couple of reminders:

9-14-2005



Grades are now accessible online. Not every grade is up in the database yet. Go to OH or Lab to ask a TA for your password. If something is wrong, tell us in person. Do not e-mail us; the online gradebook is a work in progress and we most likely already know something is wrong.

9-13-2005



If you still don't have cardkey access to 125 Cory, please head over to 387 Soda or 253 Cory to obtain access. They already have the student enrollment list in their database.

9-12-2005



There has been a change to the website's organization. E-mail Po-kai if you have problems accessing any portion of the website.

9-8-2005



A minor change to the documentation for Lab 1 has been made. Page 7 has been updated to account for the newest version of Xilinx.

9-2-2005



If you wanted to switch lab sections and you filled in the lab section switch request form during lab lecture, go to your preferred lab next week. Otherwise, if you are an extension student, show up to the Thursday lab or if you are an enrolled/waitlisted student, show up to the lab you are in according to Telebears. Check the lab assignments here. Notice the small number of students in the Thursday section. E-mail Po-kai if you can switch to that section.

9-2-2005

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UC Berkeley http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs150/ EECS 150 Fall 2005