Homework #4

Guidelines

  1. Instantiate a pair of cascaded counters, similar to those in Figure 13.2 of the text. The pair of counters operate in a coordinated fashion, with one counter representing a least significant value, and the other a most significant value. When the least significant counter is going to roll over, the most significant counter will count up by one. At no other time will the most significant counter increment.

    You should have one counter that operates according to the following truth table.
    clk reset ctrl Q+
    0,1,falling x x Q
    rising 0 x 0
    rising 1 0 Q
    rising 1 1 Q+1 mod 5
    You should instantiate this counter twice and add some glue logic between the two devices so that the most significant counter counts up only when the less significant counter is going to roll over. Include the truth table for the glue logic as an explicit comment in your VHDL code. The high-level architecture for this assignment is given in the block diagram below. Please note that the "roll" signal coming from the counter probably should not be included in your counter, rather it would be easier to realize as a a combinational logic statement along side the two counter instances.


    The top level entity description should look like the following. When ctrl = '1', the counters are enabled to count up as a cascade pair, and when ctrl = '0', the counter should hold their value.
    entity hw4 is
            port(	clk, reset: in std_logic; 
    		ctrl: in std_logic;
    		Q1, Q0: out unsigned(2 downto 0));
    end hw4;
    

    Turn In

    • A hardcopy (plus digital copy via BitBucket) of your VHDL code, testbench, and waveform (include a proper header).
    • Neatly draw the Circuit Diagram for your cascade counter.
    • A testbench exercising the cascade pair. It must:
      • Hold the least significant counter at 4 for one clock cycle (using ctrl='0').
      • Roll over the least significant counter once.
      • Show clk, reset, Q1, Q0, (least significant) roll signal, and the ctrl input to the most significant counter.
      • Remove all junk signals.
      • Fit waveform on one page.

    Testbench Tip

    In order to test your cascade counters, you will need to apply a complex test sequence to the control signal. The following VHDL code in your testbench will help achieve this. This is CSA version of the process structure given in section 2.2.4 of the textbook.
    ctrl <= '1', '0' after 15us, '1' after 16us, '0' after 17us, '1' after 18us;
    
    Check out the testbench linked at the top of lecture 4 for more details.