Abstract

Chiphack aims to give the participants a firm understanding or verilog through a number of hands-on exercises and short, 20 minute talks. To celebrate the 60 year anniversary of the British Computer Society, half of the course will be EDSAC themed, the computer that the founding President, Sir Maurice Wilkes, designed and built between 1947 and 1949.

To teach participants about the EDSAC, a simulation of it shall be designed and written for an FPGA and some peripherals, that are easy and cheap to build so that schools and colleges can reproduce this work, that can interface with the FPGA will be used to show in more detail how the EDSAC physical components worked.

The first and second days are 9:00 to 17:00 and the third day shall be 9:00 to 12:00. Lunch, teas, and coffees shall be provided on the day. A brief overview of the schedule is described below.

The first day, Wednesday 6th September, shall be devoted to learning verilog and starts with just turning a LED on and off and develops into implementing a UART transmitter. Implementing a UART receiver will be an extension exercise for those comfortable and confident in verilog. Talks on the Wednesday shall be “Setup” by …(Dan?), “Introduction to verilog” by … (Richard Miller?), “Verilog UART” by …(Phillip Wargar?).

Day two, Thursday 7th September, will start with finishing the UART exercises but will be mainly focused on the EDSAC. After the participants are setup again, they will be introduced to the EDSAC simulator and will practice with it until lunch. During the afternoon, the participants will use the peripherals to learn about more features of the EDSAC. More lectures on the EDSAC will be scattered throughout the day. The introductory talks for the day shall be “the EDSAC simulator” by …(Hatim?), …(Peter or someone rebuilding it?) shall introduce the peripherals. Other lectures may include “First hand experience of EDSAC”, “Working with Maurice Wilkes”, “Rebuilding EDSAC”, “Educating a new generation about EDSAC” and “Software simulators”.

On the final day, Friday 8th September, the participants shall carry on practicing with the peripherals. As an extension, the participants will be encouraged to try to add some new features to the simulation that were implemented in the EDSAC after 1950, such as a postmortem debug method. The Chiphack will be concluded with a “Thank you” talk given by …(Mary or Dan?) before lunch.

The workshop will be based around the MyStorm board, a capable FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) development board. The MyStorm board shall be provided at the event and some boards will be purchasable from . A laptop with USB connection is required and a linux machine is preferred. Some software is required to be downloaded before the event. Links to the software shall be provided on the Wiki.