"If at first you don't succeed, redefine success."
-- Anonymous

Summary

The MAGIC Enchilada ALU performed about as well as we expected. We found it very exciting to be able to work together and build a tangible product from the ground up. We believe the design has been rigorously tested and will be able to operate in the 3-7 MHz range effectively.

By extending the Opcode to 4 bits we could have implemented a number of simple unary and binary bit-wise operations, but we felt that there would be little education value in such an exercise, especially compared to what was learned designing the other features.

We were also concerned for much of the semester that we would be shackled with major space limitations, so we made use of designs that would use a little space as possible. Had we known earlier how much extra space we had, we could have designed in more functions and more time-efficient implentations.

References

Karplus, Kevin. Various papers.

Weste, Neil and Kamran Esjraghian, Principles of CMOS VLSI Design: A Systems Perspective. New York: Addison Wesley, 1993.

Patterson and Hennessy, Computer Organization & Design

Cavallaro, Joseph R., VLSI Design I.

Division of Work

The work of this project was spread fairly evenly between all the members. All of us felt like we were given a fair number of duties to perform, and that everyone took the responsibility of getting everything done.

Latches	Kurt, Shion
Multiplexers	Kurt, Shion
Adder	Ted
Counter PLA creation	Ted
Control PLA States	Ted, Shion
Control PLA creation	Ted
B latch	Kurt
C latch	Kurt
Clo latch	Shion
Lil' Error PLA	Ted
Cell Placement	All
Intra-Cell Routing	Kurt
GND,Vdd Routing	Shion
Irsim analysis	All
Overall Testing	Kurt, Ted
Overall Crystal + Spice testing	Ted
PLA control wiring	Kurt Krukenberg
Web Page Development	Shion
Web Page Content	Shion, Ted
Poster	Kurt, Ted
Inspiration	Taco Cabana

Comments and Suggestions on CAD tools

In general, we thought that the CAD tools were sufficient for the task given to us. It does amaze us, however, that we could have designed and simulated correctly a design completely lacking any substrate contacts and still get away with it.