Final Report

Guidelines for the production of a final report.

Overview

Each team is required to submit just one report^†.

The task of the report is to document your current working design (as distinct from previous development versions) and to explain/justify your design decisions.

In particular you should document:

• The design of the instruction set and its mapping to the chosen architecture. To achieve a good mark for the design it will be necessary to show that your design has been influenced by your independent research and/or original thinking.

• The design of the circuit and its use of hierarchy. Of particular interest is the re-use of blocks to reduce layout time.

• The implementation of the design onto silicon along with its proven functionality.

• The design of good test vectors which test the different features of the design.

Length of Report

The main body of the team report (not including appendices) should not exceed 30 sides of A4 (about 9000 words) and should include plenty of well chosen figures (remember to discuss the figures in the text).

The maximum number of pages for the full team report including the appendices is 50.

The Final Report in Relation to Other Documents

You should not assume that the reader has read or has access to any other document (e.g. your individual research reports, your initial design document or your programmers' guide).

You can re-use text and figures from any of your team documents in your final report if this helps to explain your design. Such material may be included in the main body of the report or in an appendix provided that document length restrictions are not exceeded.

As usual there is no one right way to present the material. Each of the following is a valid approach to the overlap between the programmer's guide and the final report relating to the coverage of the instruction set:

1. a team might include the instruction set summary from their programmer's guide as an appendix and then refer to the appendix in a chapter discussing instruction set design.

2. a team might include the instruction set coding section from their programmer's guide in the main body of their report.

3. a team might choose to present the instruction set information in a completely different way in their final report and may not re-use any text or figures related to the instruction set.

Above all, remember the purpose of the final report is to document your current working design and to explain/justify your design decisions. In contrast the purpose of the programmer's guide is to act as a guide to programmers of your completed microprocessor. You will be judged on how well a document fullfils its purpose not on how much or how little overlap there is between documents.

Project Management

An appendix to the report should indicate how the project was managed and how the tasks were divided amongst the members of the group. This will aid in the adjustment of marks for the different group members. The appendix should also include a standard division of labour form which provides a quantitative measure of the contribution from each group member.

Report Presentation

This is a formal report with all the usual green/orange covers, ring binding, contents, introduction, chapters, conclusion, references, good pictures and well written sentences with no spelling/grammatical errors. See report writing guidelines from digital IC design module for more details.

As usual you should draw your own pictures and use your own words to describe your design.

Since this report is a team effort, the author(s) of each section or chapter should be declared in order to allow the fair allocation of marks.

You may include information in appendicies in order to make the main body of the report more readable as you see fit. Remember that an appendix should be used to provide supporting (non-essential) information and that it will not be read at all unless it is mentioned in the main body of the report.

Individual Reports / Minority Reports