Lecturer: Carla Vacchi  

Course name: Architetture VLSI per l'elaborazione digitale dei segnali
Course code: 064016
Degree course: Ingegneria Elettronica, Ingegneria Informatica
Disciplinary field of science: ING-INF/01
L'insegnamento è caratterizzante per: Ingegneria Informatica
The course relates to: Ingegneria Informatica
University credits: CFU 5
Course website: http://www.unipv.it/vacchi/ArchitettureVLSI.html

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 circuit design areas. Circuits for basic operations as such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are described and applied to the design of linear filters (IIR and FIR). Parallel processing and pipelining to improve throughput or minimize area and power consumption are discussed. Examples cover practical applications such as signal acquisition, analysis, transmission, storage, and synthesis.

Course programme

Architectures for basic operations and elementary functions
Ripple Carry Adder, Carry Select Adder, Carry Skip Adder, Conditional Sum Adder, Carry Lookahead Adder, Multioperand addition: Carry Save Architecture and Binary Adder Tree, Braun Parallel multiplier, Baugh-Wooley multiplier, Booth multiplier, restoring and non restoring divider.

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, Z-transform, time and frequency domain analysis, processing digital convolution, Discrete and Fast Fourier Transforms.

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

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): 29
Practical class (hours/year in lecture theatre): 11
Practicals / Workshops (hours/year in lecture theatre): 10
Project work (hours/year in lecture theatre): 0

Suggested reading materials

C. Vacchi. Course Slides (on line).

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

Testing and exams

Written and oral examination. The student can replace oral examination with the project of a digital system in VHDL language.