System on Chip

At the end of the lectures, third-year students in the InSys program in the EEEA department will be able to:
•    define precisely what a SoC is;
•    explain the advantages of these circuits
•    compare the relevance of choosing a SoC over an ASIC.
At the end of the project sessions, third-year students in the InSys program in the EEEA department will be able :
•    generate an SoC and integrate it into a Xilinx Zynq FPGA circuit;
•    test different function development techniques on this family of circuits (hardware or software)
•    imagine and produce audio functions that can be implemented on the circuit, having chosen the most efficient technique.

The System-On-Chip course consists of two lectures and around ten project sessions.

The lectures provide a detailed description of what a System-On-Chip is, its technological and economic advantages, its limitations and challenges, and why these circuits constitute a rapidly expanding market. In particular, the concepts of reuse, IP, and hardware/software co-development are explained in detail.

The project sessions put these concepts into practice by designing an audio effects device in the Xilinx Vivado development environment on a Zynq development board. During the first sessions, students develop the Zynq hardware configuration and program the microcontroller in C language to briefly control an audio codec. They then develop and add audio effects of their choice to this basic configuration, in C or VHDL.

The assessment consists of two parts: a demonstration of the circuit and the effects developed during the session, and a report, in English, based on the model of a device user manual.

Basic knowledge of microelectronics and embedded systems, in particular:
   - Silicon technology
 - Microprocessor architecture
 - Timing analysis
  * Basic experience with the Xilinx Vivado development environment
  * Basic experience with VHDL and C programming languages