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Design Plan - Design Phase
Part 1 - November 2009 -> December 2009
Starting in November, we began putting all of our research ideas to work and developed a preliminary design. The design was later sent off to our customer for approval.
Throughout the creation of the design, we came across several aspects that either weren't possible, or just weren't feasible to complete on an FPGA. This required us to continually go back to the Research Phase for more ideas on how to approach the project. However, by the end of the this part of the design phase, we completed the design of the analog portion of the project, as well as 90% of the digital portion.
Milestones Reached
- Completed Analog Design, including part numbers, systems diagrams, etc.
- Completed Digital Design, with the exception of the output to the user through the audio CODEC
- Gave a presentation about our design to our fellow Design4Practice peers.
- Completed design document, which was sent to our customer for approval
Key Design Decisions
- The choice of analog components. This was important as the choice in analog components would affect the incoming signal to the digital portion of the project
Tools Used
- Dr. Phil Mlsna
- Dr. Niranjan Venkatraman
- Mr. John Sharber (shop manager at NAU)
- Matlab
Part 2 - January 2010 -> February 2010
Following the winter break, we had not received any contact from our sponsor regarding our initial design. Unfortunately, the analog parts we had selected could only be bought in groups of 1000, while we only needed one or two parts at most. Because we couldn't contact our sponsor regarding the purchase of these parts, we needed to come up with an alternative to our analog section. We decided to remove the analog section from our project entirely, since the focus of our project was the digital portion. In replace of the analog section, we would generate the inputs using Matlab, and then feed those inputs into our test board from a second FPGA that was available to us thanks to Mr. John Sharber.
Milestones Reached
- Found a viable alternative to the analog portion of our project
Key Design Decisions
- The choice to use Matlab and a second FPGA for the alternative design. This was chosen primarily because all of the tools we needed were already available to us, and thus we didn't need to purchase any other equipment.
Tools Used
- Mr. John Sharber
- Matlab
- Altera DE1 FPGA Prototype board (provided by Mr. Sharber)
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