• Offered for Year: 2025/26

• Module Leader(s): Dr Alex Bystrov
• Lecturer: Dr Matthew Dyson

• Owning School: Engineering
• Teaching Location: Newcastle City Campus

Semesters

Your programme is made up of credits, the total differs on programme to programme.

Aims

This coursework module is aimed at development of knowledge and skills for highly efficient with respect to power, performance and time to market implementation of signal processing, interfacing and control blocks. The aims of the:


Knowledge, skills and design experience on reconfigurable hardware platforms (FPGA chips) in the context of their Degree Programmes.

Needs of the modern electronics and comms industry following the major design trends outlined in the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (current edition).

Consistency in preparation of the students to the Individual Project

Outline Of Syllabus

The module includes lectures, hands-on tutorials and a closely supervised design mini-project, where students work in the laboratory, implementing their designs on an FPGA development board while using industry standard tools. The design example covers an application in signal processing and advanced interfacing.

The lectures cover the basic design principles with VHDL, Intel/Altera development tool, a number of interfaces and signal protocols, FIR filter implementation with VHDL, debugging the design on the FPGA development board, writing a technical report.

Teaching Methods

Teaching Activities

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Lectures (online materials) provide adequate overview, background, literature sources and introduce the methodology
Hands-on tutorials speed-up the phase of familiarisation with complex software tools.
Supervised practicals – this is where the student make the key design decisions in their project under facilitation and guidance of experienced staff.
Unsupervised time in the laboratory/online (included into the Private Study activity) – routine implementation work.
Report writing (included into the Private Study activity) – written communication skill, summarises and organises all learning outcomes. It is also used for assessment.

Assessment Methods

The format of resits will be determined by the Board of Examiners

Other Assessment

Formative Assessments

Formative Assessment is an assessment which develops your skills in being assessed, allows for you to receive feedback, and prepares you for being assessed. However, it does not count to your final mark.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

The written report must fulfil the SOLO criteria for the extended abstract type work. As such, it must contain the following parts: Aims and Objectives, Introduction, Results, Discussion, Conclusions and References. All the learning outcomes defined above must be reflected in the report. The adequate guidance on report writing will be provided by the academic staff.
Up to 50% of the report can be replaced with equivalent content in the form of tables, diagrams, equations and screen shots. Any illustrative material must be adequately integrated and discussed in the main text.
The report must include the summary of the results of 3 hours reading of the current edition of ITRS document; the reading time is included into the private study article.
Prof skill assessment is implemented in the middle of the module, which gives the students an opportunity to defend their results, compare it to the results of the peers and to receive/discuss the feedback from the instructor before submitting the report.
AHEP4 learning outcomes both delivered and assessed in the report are M1,M2,M17, those assessed by the results of self-directed learning are M4, delivered and assessed by continuous assessment is M16.

Reading Lists

• EEE8088's Reading List

Timetable

• Timetable Website: www.ncl.ac.uk/timetable/
• EEE8088's Timetable