SoC 101 - Lecture 8b: The Boot Sequence

System-on-Chip 101
or
"Everything you wanted to know about a computer but were afraid to ask"
This is Lecture 8 of my "SoC 101" course at Bar-Ilan University. In this course, I provide an overview of computer hardware engineering and SoC design, covering the full stack from the basic terminology, through computer architecture, and up to low-level software and design methodologies. The purpose of this course is to methodologically tell you about all those things that you may not have heard during your engineering studies and "fill the gaps" between the parts that you learned in-depth. It is in no way intended to provide a full, detailed description of every concept introduced, but following the course will give you a good idea about how a computer or any embedded system actually works.
Lecture 8 is kind of a bonus lecture or an appendix - not something that was preplanned, but I just had to make it after the adventure that we had. This lecture covers the ramp up and debug of an SoC that we fabricated. It's not an exhaustive lecture about everything you should do or how to methodologically traverse this challenge, but rather the story of a really cool debug process we went through, which is the basis of a learning experience. After preparing the slides and sleeping on it a bit, I decided that this is the perfect wrap up for the SoC 101 course and I promise that you will enjoy.
Lecture slides can be found on the EnICS Labs web site at:
enicslabs.com/...
All rights reserved:
Prof. Adam Teman @AdiTeman
Emerging nanoscaled Integrated Circuits and Systems (EnICS) Labs
Faculty of Engineering, Bar-Ilan University