Computer-Aided

Engineering
Dr. Gbor Hossz
E-mail: hosszu@nimrud.eet.bme.hu
Media and System Inf. Lab.
Dept. of Electron Devices, BME
Room: V2 Build. No. 349
Home page: http://nimrud.eet.bme.hu/cae
Introduction
Overview
Main topics:
Short introduction to the subject
Digital circuit fundamentals
ASIC, PLD, FPGA
VHDL basics
Advanced VHDL language structures
Circuit examples
Laboratory practice
Introduction
How to learn during the semester?
In the lectures there are
Theoretical parts and
Practical parts (problems)
During the semester at home
Read again the theoretical parts
Solve again the practical problems
What is a Digital ASIC
An ASIC is an Application Specific Integrated Circuit i.e.
a hardware circuit, that:
is designed for a particular application
executes one or a few carefully chosen algorithms
outperforms a software-based solution exploiting parallellism in
hardware
Examples:
Graphics accellerator
Ethernet controller
Introduction
Why study this subject
ASIC's are vital components in most IT-systems, in
particular if low power is crucial
HDL Simulation & Synthesis are what C/C++ compilers
are for SW
VHDL is one of the most popular HDLs
Contributing factors are time to market, reuseability and
technology independence
Introduction
New way for designing
Writing VHDL code instead of using schematic
components (e.g. gates) is a new way of designing
Working with VHDL does not simply mean writing code,
there are also facilities for building hierarchies and
designing with a component library
VHDL is also good for writing code for standard circuits
(e.g. Motorola 680020)
Introduction
Computer-Aided Design (CAD)
Designing with VHDL means that the designer writes code and
then verifies the function in a simulator, following which the
code is synthesized into a netlist
Synthesis can be compared to a compiler which translates the
code into machine code
In hardware, the VHDL code is translated into a schematic with
gates and flip-flops
Introduction