Digital Logic Design
Project Final Report
The final report provides complete
documentation of your design as well as the history of your thinking about
it throughout the semester. In that regard, it should contain enough
information so that one of the TAs who didn't know anything about your
project could understand what you are trying to build, build it and evaluate
it. In addition, it should contain all of the checkpoints that you
submitted along the way as appendices. You can refer to the appendices
in the report, rather than duplicating information, and comment on them.
As with other work throughout the
semester, the report may be submitted in hard-copy form or may be submitted
via the Web. If you choose the Web, then simply mail the URL of your final
submission, as explained below. Naturally, we would prefer Web-based submissions!
The report should begin with an
abstract of your project (the abstract must be included on
your title page), a summary of how you approached the project and a description
of your final implementation, it should include full schematics, block
diagrams, state diagrams, timing diagrams, software listings, parts lists,
and final technical documentation of the design in the form of an operations
guide ("user’s manual"), as described in detail below.
As in all technical writing, your
objective here is to convey the maximum amount of relevant information
in as little space as possible. Each section has a maximum page limit,
but feel free to write less than the maximum amount if you can do so and
maintain your effectiveness. Each paragraph in good technical writing conveys
one point. Its first sentence makes the point, and the remaining sentences
embellish it. For example:
"The system digitizes
two input formats: NTSC (composite color video), and SVIDEO (separate luminance
[brightness] and chrominance [color] signals). A TDA8708 video ADC digitizes
the composite or luminance signal at 13.5 MHz, eight bits per sample. A
similar TDA8709 digitizes the SVIDEO chrominance signal."
.
Overall Outline of Your Report
Your entire report should be less
than 20 pages long, including all figures but excluding the Appendicies
listed below. Each section of the report described below has a maximum
recommended size listed for single-spaced, 12 point text.
Title Page
Title of your project (e.g.
Intelligent Refrigerator)
Design Team: Name(s), e-mail
addresses, and Lab Sections of you and your project partner(s).
Name of your Project TA
Date
Project Abstract
Brief summary of the problem you
are trying to solve (1-2 paragraphs).
Table of Contents
One page.
Executive Summary
The executive summary should
contain a high-level description of your project and a few words about
why you selected it.
You should then describe the overall
aspects of your design, using a block-diagram, flow graph, or whatever
descriptive approach conveys the major elements of your project as concisely
and clearly as possible.
You should also describe all of
the high-level decisions you had to make and why you made them (e.g. "we
chose to use a controller-based approach rather than building hard-wired
logic for this aspect because…," "if we had gone with our fist
approach, the wiring would have dominated...").
Finally, you should summarize the
end state of your project (e.g. "we were able to complete the implementation
and demonstrate all of our tests...", "we completed the I/O blocks,
but could not finish debugging the controller software because..."
This section of the report should
not exceed 3 pages.
Technical Documentation
In this section you should
provide step- by-step instructions on how to operate the machine and how
walk through all the capabilities of your design, almost like a tutorial
or detailed user’s manual. This documentation will also help the TA's as
far as what to do to test the capabilities of the machine.
This section of the report should
not exceed 5 pages.
Overall Description of the System
Here you should summarize
the final implementation of your design in detail. You should use high-level
schematics, code fragments, block diagrams and flow charts as appropriate.
You should refer to your final schematics and code listings in the Appendices
as necessary. The documentation should be complete enough that a TA could
implement and debug your design using the information contained in this
section.
This section of the report should
not exceed 5 pages.
Design Review
In this final section, please
include a summary of your experiences throughout the project—what you learned,
what mistakes you might have made in planning, approach, etc. What were
the most important aspects of the project for you? Where did you spend
most of your time? What aspects seemed unimportant or redundant? Please
review your "Risk Assessment" section of the previous checkpoint
and comment on how realistic it was. Include an "if I were to do this
again I would..." paragraph.
This section of the report should
not exceed 5 pages.
Appendices
Appendix A: Checkpoint #1: Preliminary
Project Plan.
Appendix B: Checkpoint #2: Final
Project Plan.
Appendix C: Checkpoint #3: Project
Evaluation Plan.
Appendix D: Checkpoint #4: Schematics
and Implementation
Appendix E: Final Schematics
Appendix F: Software Listings
(if any)
Don’t forget, your project report
must be submitted to the TAs by Tuesday, May 13th, 5pm. If you submit your
project for demonstration on or before Friday, May2nd, 5pm you will receive
a 10 point (~10%) bonus for completing the work early (the report deadline
is then Tuesday May 6th.). If you plan to submit hard-copy, it is a good
idea to make a copy of your report for each member of your team and bind
the original for submission. In the past, many CS150 students have used
their project lab reports in internship and job interviews with success.