Exam 2 Study Guide

The second exam will cover material on your introduction to FPGAs and VHDL, and the work you did with real-time control. The questions will be from the material presented in class, and what you should have learned from completing both of those assignments.

For this exam you should be able to:

FPGAs and VHDL

• Describe what an FPGA is, and the advantages of using them over custom hardware.
• Identify common elements found in many FPGAs.
• Describe why a software-like approach for defining FPGA functionality pays benefits.
• Define hardware/software co-design, and discuss how tools such as ImpulseC and System C are trying to make it easier to do this joint design.
• Distinguish between the different sections of a VHDL circuit definition, such as Entity, Architecture, and constraint file.
• Identify different types of VHDL concurrent statements. Contrast concurrent statements vs. sequential statements.
• Describe what triggers execution of a concurrent statement. Describe what triggers execution of a process block.
• Explain the operation of VHDL statements such as signal assignment, process, conditional and selected assignment,
• Explain the operation of the sensitivity list and wait statement within a VHDL process statement.
• Show how to detect an event on a signal such as the edge of a clock.

Z-Transforms and Real-Time Control

• Distinguish how time is treated in discrete-time and continuous-time systems.
• Identify the transform space used for analyzing continuous-time and discrete-time systems.
• Describe the characteristics of time domain difference equations and how to calculate values.
• Describe the transform a time series of values, u(k), into the Z-domain representation of that signal, U(z).
• Translate a Z-domain transfer function into a time-domain difference equation.
• Compute the output of a transfer function given the input forcing function.
• Describe the elements in a basic closed-loop control system.
• Identify the condition necessary to have a causal control system.
• Identify the effects on system response of varying PID controller parameters.
• Describe the structure and approach you have taken for implementing a real-time control system under QNX.