This week was really a busy week and it passed so fast that I didn’t even realize that today is Friday again! I have spent a lot of my time fixing the bugs in the SHA1 driver when it was tested on the Simulator. Later, I started to test the GPIO driver that I have done during Week 2. It was a fairly simple driver which does simple reading and writing. Only few modifications were required for the gpio driver Read more
My interns decided to order pizza for lunch at the office, yesterday. They managed to convince a pizza place from Bangsar to deliver to Cheras. Kudos!
This week although wasn’t that productive but I still manage to start working a little on the following new stages that are the 4th stage-Memory Access and the final stage-WriteBack. The first 2 day of the week I continue on code checking before further implement the following stages. Carry bit were checked for any arithmetic and shifting instructions that involved carry flag -MSR[29]. In Memory Access stage, I need to use appropriate getMem() and setMem() to read and write memory Read more
During my 10th week at Aeste, I continued my unfinished business from the 9th week: bit banging the gpio to implement a custom 8 bits wide bus. I spent most of my time this week debugging the gpio driver for the custom bus. My code was ready at the beginning of the week, but it was buggy, and didn’t quite work. One of the most crucial problem is to set the right timing as when to set or read the Read more
My last week surprisingly didn’t involve any more hardware and I had opportunity to play again with some good old C. The task for this week was to write the missing software part for the ECDSA, that is the whole algorithm for signature generation and verification (keeping in mind that scalar point multiplication and SHA-1 portion is already taken care of in hardware). The only difficulty was that numbers are well above the int range so I had to write Read more
With the footprints done, wrestling with PCB design continues as usual with component placement and routing. Also this week, I hit a minor snag with regards to simple yet confusing aspect of my task. Blow-by-blow account below, but click here to leap to the summary. Layout & Design Rules As mentioned last week, the end-product will fit the Arduino form factor. The initial schematic had 54 digital I/O pins, but during the laying out of parts on the board a Read more
I’ve managed to completely remove the Icache from AEMB. Simulation and FPGA implementation were both a success. However, after the edits AEMB now runs slower because it has to fetch each and every one of it’s instructions through at least two Wishbone cycles. It’s worth mentioning that Before removing the Icache at some points AEMB managed to execute instruction in one clock cycle. Thus I believe there is a big room for improvement even though it won’t be an easy Read more
Continuing from the last week, the reason that why the connection will be timed out when uploading a larger file is due to the modification I made to calculate the data size uploaded. The method was removed for the mean time and tested the code out. It turns out that the minor modification to the tightest loop is working partially, some data was written into the SD card successfully with some other garbage data. There are two observations that I Read more
This is my fifth week at AESTE, undeniably, I have learned a lot and I think that my programming skills is gradually improving as I implement my tasks. I have spent the first 2 days to continue implementing the SHA1 driver as it was unfinished last week. Later, my program for this driver was tested by a simulator- GTKWave and I found out that there were quite a few of tiny mistakes in my codes. My colleague, Mostafa and I Read more
This week has been the shortest one since I started my internship at Aeste because we were having holidays for the Raya Aidilfitri. During the 3 working days of the week, I worked on the GPIO driver to let two raspberry pi communicate with each other. After some discussions with my supervisor, I decided to make a synchronous bus using the GPIO because it is the easier option. There are several ways of controlling the raspberry pi’s GPIO: wiringpi C Read more