The goal of EE109 is to help you design and deliver an embedded system. We would like to guide you with enough instructions on how to explore a topic of your interest. To start with, we provide you with a template that could guide you through the process of making a feasible plan. Here are the questions you need to keep in mind when making your project plan. You do not have to prepare a perfect answer for each one of them right away, but we hope you would have a better understanding of what you want to achieve by thinking of these quetions:
- Introduction: What is the topic you want to explore?
- Literature survey: Has anyone else done similar tasks before? What are their approaches? What is your approach?
- Project description: What does your design look like? A block diagram would be helpful.
- Measure: How do you measure the quality of your design?
- Planning: What is the timeline? The process of hardware design usually takes a few steps:
- Software simulation: Describe your design in software.
- Hardware simulation: Describe your design in hardware. Simulate the design. The functional and cycle-accurate simulations will tell you if your design is correct.
- Hardware deployment: Generate bitstream and deploy it on board.
- Report on your findings: Measure how good your design is. What are some of the new aspects you discovered about this topic? You need to make sure that you have allocated enough time for each one of the four steps.
To compile your project proposal, we suggest that you follow the format of including the above five sections with enough elaboration on what you intend to do. You may also want to talk to the course staff about your project plan as early as possible. A good project plan usually takes a few iterations to edit, and we want to make sure that you have all the plannings ready before starting your journey. Feel free to schedule individual meetings with the TAs.