Lecturer: Carla Vacchi  

Course name: VLSI Architectures for digital signal processing
Course code: 503272
Degree course: Ingegneria Elettronica, Ingegneria Informatica
Disciplinary field of science: ING-INF/01
The course relates to:
University credits: CFU 6
Course website: http://www-3.unipv.it/vacchi/didattica/ArchiVLSI270.php

Specific course objectives

The course deals with many aspects of digital architectures and their circuital implementation, to cover the gap between the signal processing algorithm development and the design of the final circuits. It is geared towards students interested in the application and digital circuit design areas. Circuits for basic operations such as addition, subtraction and multiplication are described and applied to the design of linear filters (IIR and FIR). Parallel processing and pipelining to improve throughput or to minimize area and power consumption are discussed.

Course programme

Architectures for basic operations and elementary functions
Full Adder implementations. Sequential Adder, Ripple Carry Adder, Carry Select Adder, Carry Skip Adder, Conditional Sum Adder, Carry Lookahead Adder. Multioperand addition: Carry Save Architecture and Binary Adder Tree. Multipliers: Sequential multiplier, Braun Parallel, Baugh-Wooley and Booth multipliers. Overview of implementation for divider, square root and trigonometric functions.

Techniques for low power, high throughput
Parallel processing, pipelining and retiming.

Fundamentals on digital signals and systems
Analog and digital signals, analog to digital conversion, representation of digital systems, time and frequency domain analysis. LTI systems: impulse response and transfer function.

Design and application of digital filters
FIR and IIR filters. Direct, transpose, cascade and parallel-form filter structure. Quantisation. Multirate Digital Signal Processing.

Exercises and Laboratories
Exercises on the course topics are solved directly by the teacher, or proposed as homework with professor review to highlight and correct errors and misunderstanding. Lab sessions are focused on matlab simulation of digital sistems and filters; students are organized into groups.

Course entry requirements

Numerical sequences, algebraic and differential equations, combinational and sequential logic, spectral analysis.

Course structure and teaching

Lectures (hours/year in lecture theatre): 34
Practical class (hours/year in lecture theatre): 14
Practicals / Workshops (hours/year in lecture theatre): 16

Suggested reading materials

Notes provided by the professor, copies of slides used in the lectures, examples of written tests (italian), instruction manuals for the lab are available on the course website

P. Pirsch. Architectures for digital signal processing. Wiley.

J. G. Proakis, D. G. Manolakis. . Digital Signal Processing. Prentice Hall.

Testing and exams

The exam consists of : 1) exercises (time available: 2.5 hours) related with the analysis and/or design of digital systems (weight of 0.6 on the final score). Books and notes are allowed during the test. 2) a brief (30 minutes) written theoretical section where 30 multiple choices tests, problems and theory questions are proposed (weight of 0.4 on the final score). No text (books, notes and so on) will be allowed during the test.