EECS150 Components and Design Techniques for Digital Systems

EECS150 Spring 2009
Syllabus
 

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Sections...


Course Grading

  • 15% - Homework/Quizzes
  • 10% - Labs
  • 35% - Project
  • 15% - Midterm (1 only)
  • 25% - Final

Textbooks
Required D. M. Harris, S. L. Harris, Digital Design and Computer Architecture ('DDCA'), Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, 2007. ISBN 13: 978-0-12-370497-9; ISBN 10: 0-12-370494-9

Catalog Description

EECS150: Components and Design Techniques for Digital Systems. (5)

Three hours of lecture, one hour of discussion, and three hours of laboratory per week. Prerequisites: CS61C, Electrical Engineering 40 or 42. Basic building blocks and design methods to contruct synchronous digital systems. Alternative representations for digital systems. Standard logic (SSI, MSI) vs. programmable logic (PLD, FPGA). Finite state machine design. Digital computer building blocks as case studies. Introduction to computer-aided design software. Formal hardware laboratories and substantial design project. Informal software laboratory periodically throughout semester. (F,SP) Katz, Pister, Wawrzynek.


Course Goals

  • Understand digital logic at the gate and switch level including both combinational and sequential logic elements.
  • Understand clocking methodologies to manage information flow and preservation of circuit state.
  • Appreciate digital logic specification methods and the compilation process that transforms these into logic networks.
  • Gain experience with computer-aided design tools for implementation with programmable logic devices.
  • Appreciate the advantages/disadvantages between hardware and software implementations of a function.

Policies

  • You must complete your previous week's laboratory assignment and have it checked off completely 10 minutes after the beginning of the current week's lab. You can arrange to do this by making an appointment with your TA, seeing him during his office hours, or having it checked off during the lab period that it was assigned.
  • Project checkpoints solutions will not include source code.   They will however simulate and synthesize correctly. 
  • Do not fall behind -- it is virtually impossible to catch up, as the labs become progressively more difficult over the course of the semester.
  • Since the substantial lab project is a major effort involving a lab partner, it is essential that you contact your partner, your TA, and your instructor if you intend to drop the course!
  • Homework will be posted on Thursday, and will be due by 2:10pm SHARP (start of lab lecture) on Friday, 8 days later.
  • Homework solutions will be prepared and posted to the website. Homework will be graded on a 0-3pt effort basis
  • Graded homeworks and lab checkoff sheets are returned in the lab (125 Cory).
  • See the Calendar page for handouts, assignments, and announcements.
  • Regrades are by written petition only. The petition should succinctly state why you believe that your solution is correct when we believed it to be wrong. These should be given to the instructor. Please note that we do provide partial credit and we grade consistently across all exams.

Academic Honesty
Cheating will not be tolerated. See here for details.

Switching Sections
Discussion Attend the one you signed up for at least for a week or two.  Otherwise some discussions will be much too large.  After about the second week of discussion (third of lecture) feel free to attend any discussion you like as long as attendance at that one is reasonable.  We recommend one taught by one of your lab TAs.
Lab

E-mail Chris (cwfletcher (at) berkeley) or Ilia (ilial (at) berkeley) with your full name, and which section you're switching from and to, and then attend the lab section you would like to be in.  Evening labs tend to be pretty full, so we may not be able allow all morning to evening switches.  We recommend morning labs!  Because there are fewer students your TAs will not be overworked, and therefore they'll be much happier (and saturated with coffee).  If you already have a project partner in mind, the two of you should be in the same lab. This is not a requirement, however.

Please note that the labs leading up to the project will be completed individually.  You will not be working with a partner until we distribute the project.


Newsgroup/Forum

You can access the newsgroup Newsgroup though a client such as Thunderbird or Windows Mail at news.csua.berkeley.edu. The server requires authentication, but does not use SSL. Use the following credentials for off-campus access: username="usenet", password="gobears". No authentication is required if you are within any of the UC Berkeley subnets.

You can also access the newsgroup via the web-based here. See http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/connecting.html#news for more details. Please make a point to check the newsgroup often. Please post course-related questions to the newsgroups instead of e-mailing your GSIs.


Website login/passwords

In order to register your username and password, please follow these instructions:

  1. Go to http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~inst/htpasswd/.
  2. In the Use this sample input: text box, replace the text already in place and type in your desired username, followed by a space, followed by your desired password in plain text.
    • For example, the contents of the Use this sample input: text box after Chris inputs his password could be: chris mypassword. ‘chris’ is Chris’ username and ‘mypassword’ is Chris' password (not really).
  3. Click the Submit this input button on the right hand side.
    • You should now see a screen with two white boxes. On the left, what you typed into the previous screen�s text box should appear. On the right, a new username:<encrypted_password> (such as chris:KMfnN9uuZBv9A) should appear.
  4. Email Chris the contents of the username:<encrypted_password> box (the box on the right).
    • You will eventually get access to the website with your supplied username and plain text password. You will not use your encrypted password (the ‘KMfnN9uuZBv9A’ thing) to login to the website. This encrypted password is only used so that no one will ever have access to what your real password is. Do not email Chris your plain text password.

Copyright UC Berkeley EECS150 http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs150/sp09/
Last Updated: 01/25/2009 by
Chris Fletcher