An FPGA Experience in ASIC Design
Liang Dong, Massood Zandi Atashbar · 2005
This paper accounts the development of the class projects for a graduate level course on application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design. As the use of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in digital systems is on the rise, and they are increasingly competitive when compared to traditional ASICs, these class projects assure that the course provides students with an experience in FPGA design methodology and implementation. ASIC/FPGA design and verification techniques are discussed in class. Hardware description language (HDL) inference of FPGA resources and coding examples are provided. Advanced techniques using the Xilinx implementation tools are also introduced. The class projects consist of regular assignments and a final team project. The regular assignments are sequenced to facilitate comprehension, with each successive exercise building on concepts demonstrated previously. The final project is more challenging, with innovation and creativity in design being emphasized. The FPGA-based development boards that were used for the projects include the Digilent D2SB-DIO4 Combination Board and the Spartan-3 Starter Board. The D2SB-DIO4 Board features a 200K-gate Xilinx Spartan 2E XC2S200E FPGA in a PQ208 package that provides 143 user I/Os. The Spartan-3 Board features a 200K-gate Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA, on-board I/O devices, and 1MB fast asynchronous SRAM. Figure 1 shows the block diagram of the Spartan-3 FPGA board. These boards make good platforms of experiments with designs from a simple logic circuit to an embedded processor core.