M.Sc. projects
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Doug Edwards 


Title: Graphical Interface for a hardware development System

For: Conversion Course Studetns

Abstract:

At present a large proportion of hardware laboratory work is performed
using Xilinx programmable logic arrays. The Xilinx arrays on the
existing boards are however not big enough for new experiments which
have been developed for the laboratory. A new board has therefore been
designed which incorporates a new genration Xilinx array and also
incorporates a microcontroller (a microprocessor with many input/ouput
ports). The use of the microcontroller allows a great deal of
flexibility in the use of the board - for example, self-testing of the
board, the ability to single-step the clock, loading and read-back of
the on-board memory asynchronously, bus-snooping so that the board can
act as a logic analyser. 


This project is in two parts - to write the code that runs on the
microcontroller and to write a graphical interface for a SUN
workstation that allows the various functions to be easily accessible
to an inexperienced user. The low-level code will be written in the
assembly language of the microcontroller. The graphical interface will
be prototyped using TCL/TK.