Final Project Milestone 0: Project Proposal

Here is a very high level overview of what your project proposal should look like. Feel free to include more information.

• Introduction: What application do you want to accelerate?
• Literature survey: Has anyone else done similar tasks before? What are their approaches? What is your approach?
• Project description: What does your design look like? A block diagram would be helpful.
• Measure: How do you measure the quality of your design? For example, you can measure the quality by looking at your design’s raw performance (e.g. #cycles) and its resource utilization (e.g. logics, ram utilization).
• Planning: What is the timeline? The process of designing a hardware system usually takes the following steps:
  • Software simulation: Describe your design in software.
  • Hardware simulation: Describe your design in hardware. Simulate the design. The functional and cycle-accurate simulations will tell you if your design is correct.
  • Hardware deployment: Generate bitstream and deploy it on board.
  • Report on your findings: Measure how good your design is. What are some of the new aspects you discovered about this topic?

You may also want to talk to the course staff about your project plan as early as possible. A good project plan usually takes a few iterations to complete, and we want to make sure that you have a concrete plan before working on your capstone project. Feel free to schedule meetings with the TAs to discuss your ideas.