An Example of Practice Based Engineering Education : the Design of a Microprogrammed MIPS Processor with the Alliance CAD System
Résumé
This paper describes a VLSI project that aimed at the design of a microprogrammed Mips R3000 microprocessor. The project starts from the functional specifications of the circuit and goes through several design steps to end with the obtaining of the factory masks to be send to the foundry. The project has been defined in the framework of a postgraduate course of VLSI design at the University of Paris 6 (Pierre et Marie Curie) and uses the public domain Alliance CAD System developed at the same university. Each team of five students, advised by a researcher, was in charge of designing a processor within a period of three weeks. This project comes after a set of four courses during which a design methodology and the usage of the Alliance CAD System has been detailed.