Assumed Knowledge: (ELEC1601 Professional Computer Engineering or ELEC1101 Foundations of Computer Systems) and (ELEC2601 Microprocessor Systems or ELEC3607 Embedded Computing) and (ELEC2602 Digital System Design or ELEC3601 Digital Systems Design or ELEC3608 Digital Systems Design).

Prohibition: ELEC4601 Computer Design.

Offered: Semester 1

Classes: 1 hour of lectures and a 3 hour lab/tutorial per week.

Assessment: Laboratory 5%, tutorial 5%, end of semester exam 90%

The digital systems design process. The design cycle. Top down design. Specification. Functional design. Structural design. Testing. Hardware description languages such as Verilog or VHDL. Digital systems architectures. Processors, buses and I/O devices. Synchronous, asynchronous and semi-synchronous buses. Bus interconnections. Memory and I/O interface design. Static and dynamic memory design. Memory interfacing. Interrupts. Vectored interrupts. Interrupt controllers. Parallel interface design. Serial interface design. Bus arbitration. Processor interfacing. IBM PC interfacing. PCB and packaging design, grounding, shielding and power distribution, some case studies.

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