User's Guide & Technical Note

Overview

As documentation for your sports altimeter chip, you will need to produce two documents intended for different audiences. Sports enthusiasts will need a User's Guide document to help them understand the operation of your sports altimeter while engineers will need a Technical Note document to help them to build the sports altimeter based on your sports altimeter chip.

The User's Guide & Technical Note (supported by the demonstration) account for 10% of the marks for ELEC6231.

The deadline for the submission of the User's Guide & Technical Note is 4.15 p.m. on Friday 2^nd May 2025.

User's Guide

The content and format of the user's guide will largely be determined by individual teams based on their research but there are a few key points below that you should take into account:

• You should aim this document at sports enthusiasts (mountaineers, cavers, skydivers, hangliger/paraglider/microlight pilots and possibly even scuba divers). Sports enthusiasts will be interested in what the sports altimeter is capable of doing and in how they should use it but they do not need to know anything about the internal operation of the device or how you built it.

• Good use of figures is essential for a well designed user's guide. At least one of the figures in your guide should show the sports altimeter as you imagine it to look once it is complete.

• For each mode of operation that you describe in the user guide, you should give details of range, resolution and accuracy. To give you an example of what is intended here, we might consider the range, resolution and accuracy information for a set of bathroom scales:
  • Range: 0.0kg - 99.9kg — what are the smallest and largest displayable values
  • Resolution: 100g — what is the minimum change that can be displayed
  • Accuracy: ±200g or ±1% (whichever is greater) — how close is the displayed value to the actual value
    Note that in some cases a graph may be the best way illustrate the manner in which accuracy varies as with the value being measured.

  In calculating the accuracy, you should consider all possible sources of inaccuracy in your system.

• The User's Guide document should not exeed 4 sides of A4. If a smaller page size is chosen (as is typical for a user guide provided with a small electronic device) then the page limit may be increased in proportion (e.g. 8 sides A5 or 16 sides A6).

Technical Note

• You should aim this document at the engineers (possibly including future project students) who will take your chip design and build it into a complete sports altimeter. Unlike the sports enthusiasts, the engineers will have an interest in the internal operation of the device but they will not be interested in the tools and processes that you used to create your design.

• While the sports enthusiasts will not read the technical note, the engineers will be able to read the user's guide. For this reason you should avoid too much duplication between the documents. It is a good idea to refer readers of the technical note to the other document where you feel they would benefit from further detail on a particular topic.

• The technical note should include an architecture diagram for your design along with a description of its principal components.

• The technical note must include details of any third-party intellectual property included in the design (hardware and software) with appropriate references to source material. If no third party intellectual property has been included in the design, the technical note should explicitly state this.

• Where design for test (DFT) is included in your design, the technical note should provide information about this. If no DFT has been included in the design, the technical note should explicitly state this.

• The technical note should include information relating to the pinout of the chip including a bonding diagram. The bonding diagram should be at a large enough scale to permit it to be used by the engineer who undertakes the bonding of your chip (more than one diagram may be needed to support this).

• The technical note should include information relating to the ciruit that will be needed to support your chip.

• The Technical Note document should not exeed 4 sides of A4.