Course Goals: To provide in-depth understanding of digital systems and their design, from specification and simulation to construction and debugging.
Enrollment: No auditing of the class will be permitted and only registered students may attend. All students must have completed the prerequisite material (CSE326/CSE370).
Textbook: Chan&Mourad, Digital Design Using Field Programmable Gate Arrays will be the primary textbook. We will also refer to your 370 text, Katz, Contemporary Digital Design (Benjamin/Cummings) for more advanced topics. You will find Katz to be a useful reference.
I find it particularly inefficient to present material in class that you can read for yourself from the text. I will try to let you know both in class and in the class schedule Web page what I expect you to read in the text before class. I will use the time in class to do examples, pose problems and explain the more difficult points. If you don't read the book before class, you will be lost and your time in class will be wasted.
Supplementary Material: Not all of what we want to cover is in the textbook. I will be handing out supplementary notes and copies of lecture slides during the quarter. I will try to hand these out before I cover them in class so that you can read ahead.
Assignments: There will be both written homework and laboratory exercises. A lab project will dominate towards the end of the quarter.
Collaborative Learning: It is well known that students can learn a lot from each other given the chance. During the second week I will assign everyone into teams of three and four students. You will have to work together to solve both homework assignments and labs. Each member of the team will be responsible for the performance of all other team members; that is, the entire team must understand the solution and contribute to part of it. We will talk about this in more detail later.
Quizzes and Exams: There will be a short (10 min.) quiz every Friday at the end of class which will cover all material covered through that Wednesday. The lowest two quiz scores will be dropped, which will allow you to miss a couple class without penalty. No excuses will be accepted. There will be no mid-term exam. The final exam will be two-hour hours, which is scheduled for 8:30-10:20, Thursday March 18, 1999. Quizzes and the final exam will be open book and open notes.
Grading: The course grade will be roughly determined as follows:
Cheating Policy: You will need to work with your team to be able to complete homework and lab assignments. It is in your best interests to contribute as much as you can. For each assignment turned in, each team member will record what they did and sign the assignment. If you did not contribute anything, you cannot sign that assignment. I will be meeting with the project teams to discuss the work they have done. There will be no collaboration on quizzes and exams. I take cheating very seriously. Any cases will be sent to the cheating committee for prosecution.