Quartus is electronic design automation (EDA) software from Altera Corporation. It is used to design and simulate digital logic circuits using schematics and hardware description languages. An extensive toolset is provided to simulate the behavior of the circuit, tweak circuit performance, and to compile the design to a programmable file for placement in one of the Altera complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs) or field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). A CPLD or FPGA takes the place of many interconnected components as a single-chip solution to a design problem. Students in CE1921 will use Quartus extensively.
ARM microprocessor and microcontroller cores are used in billions of products sold each year. In CE1921, students study the ARMv4 instruction set in depth, implement an ARMv4 computer in an FPGA, and learn ARMv4 assembly language programming. Comparisons against modern versions of the ARM instruction set (such as Thumb 2 and the Unified Assembly Language) allow students to see how instruction sets evolve through time. Students successfully completing this course advance to the second year Computer Engineering embedded systems courses and develop applications for an ARM Cortex single-board computer.
The ARM Keil MDK-ARM Integrated Development Environment installs a development tools for editing, compiling, assembly, linking, and debugging programs for ARM computers. It also allows program binaries to be flashed into program memories of a large number of ARM based single-board computers.
This course uses version 4.74 of MDK-ARM. While this is not the latest version of the toolkit, its simplicity and ability to simulate older versions of the ARM architecture make is useful in this course. Please visit the MDK-ARM 4.74 download link and install the software before the first lecture in week 2.