Intermediate Report

The intermediate report is not optional and is delivered per group. It is meant to be a midterm status check and for providing you with feedback on your specific plans for the second phase of the project. The text report which must be prepared in PDF format and all releveant source files, scripts and so on must be compressed in a ZIP file.

Your report should contain the following items:

  1. Introduction which covers problem statement and your intention.
  2. Background describing relevant previous work.
  3. Your hypothesis about the proposed RISCY_AES and/or LLVM extensions and other intended improvements. You must answer (at least) these questions: What, How, and Why?
  4. Your plans on how to implement, debug and validate those.
  5. A detailed project plan (GANTT chart) for the second phase with internal tasks and milestones. Do not forget to plan for the obligatory AES instruction extensions and the loop-unrolling pass of the LLVM at the beginning of the second phase. Assign team members to your tasks.
  6. Your selection for a baseline to compare against (the state-of-the-art in your background section).
  7. You plan on how to obtain the quantitative results needed to validate your claims.
  8. The individual contributions of the four team members in the different activities in the first phase.

Final Report

Final report is a standalone report which must clearly reflects your activities in the course. You may want to use information from intermediate report, e. g. problem statement, background, hypothesis and etc. The text report must be prepared in PDF format and supplementary files, e.g. source files and scripts, must also be available for further assessment. The report should have five chapters following each other logically with connecting links from one to the other:

  1. Introduction: In this chapter you provide a short summary of the entire work while covering the following items:
    • The problem statement which follows by a short description of the baseline design and it pros and cons.
    • Motivation which covers the general idea behind the optimization proposal and how have you decided to make the changes to the core.
    • Changes that you have performed to the CPU, together with their implications.
    • Summary of results and implications.
  2. Motivation: This chapter covers the way you analyzed the baseline processor in order to identify its weak points followed by your choices for improvement in a way which is much more descriptive and comprehensive than the introduction. You should clearly explain why you have selected the ideas and how much that is feasible along with expected results to observe.
  3. Proposed idea: This chapter contains the details of your optimization idea and how you have performed the changes. Include figures to present the architecture of the new blocks that you introduce in the design. It is advisable to start from the top level and go down to each important component, (i.e., component that you have implemented in a special manner), in such a way that it is clear where it is placed.
  4. Experimental results: This chapter covers the final results of your ideas. Provide experimental results and analyze them separately for each modification you did, as well as for combinations of improvements. In this way, you can compare the improvements in terms of cost and benefit against the baseline, against each other, and see how the results add up when you combine different improvements. You may also want to report the detailed results, including timing information, critical path information, resource utilization information from Vivado reports, and power consumption figures for all considered designs. Along with component analyses, take into account basic relevant performance metrics, e.g., area (A), critical path delay (deduced from clock frequency) (D), energy consumption (E), as well as compound metrics. It is advised to comment on the obtained results and try to identify which improvement is contributing to which figure of merit and which proposed improvement is the most effective.
  5. Conclusion: in this chapter you summarize the work and add your conclusions and possible future work plans. In this context you should also put things into perspective and include the following:
    • What was the initial plan?
    • What were the expectations?
    • What are the results and why are the results not according to the expectations in case they are not.

We encourage you to reflect individual contribution in the final report by creating a table in Introduction or Conclusion chapters expressing what part of the work, related to idea, implementation, report is accomplished by each member.