Reporting Results

Your report should have a clear flow from the beginning to the end. Sections should nicely follow each other logically with connecting links from one to the other.

In the introduction you should provide a short summary of the entire work while covering the following items:

  • Motivation for your approach: what is the general idea behind your optimization proposal, how have you decided to make the changes to the core, and why those and no other changes;
  • Changes that you have performed to the cpu, together with their implications
  • Obtained main results
  • Your main conclusions

This section should not include details about your design. At the end of the introduction add the organization (outline) of the report.

Next, include a separate section in which you motivate your choices for improvement in a way which is much more descriptive and comprehensive than what you mentioned in the introduction.

To this end you need to detail:

  • The way you analyzed the baseline processor in order to identify its weak points
  • Your findings based on which you have decided to make the improvements
  • The to be pursued improvement avenues
  • What do you expect from implementing your changes

The following section should provide a description of all the performed changes. Here you need to motivate, in detail, your design choices. For example: Let us presume that you chose to improve the multiplier. Before you go into details regarding the architecture and the implementation of the improved version, you should include a small survey of the different types of multipliers you could choose, and present the reason(s) for your choice. Do not forget to refer to the literature. While completing this section give attention to the following:

  • 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 and why.

  • Describe the way you embed your designs into the processor. You can draw the action of handshaking signals in the form of timing chart and/or state machine. Bear in mind that handling the interface signals properly is essential in order to allow for a smooth integration of your new modules within the processor.

  • Discuss the design verification aspects you considered.

  • If relevant, attach Vivado simulation results.

  • Summarize the settings of the final processor configuration.

The next section is dedicated to reporting and commenting the experimental results. In this section you should:

  • 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.
  • Report the detailed results ( including timing information, critical path information, resource utilization information from Vivado reports, and power consumption figures ) for all considered designs.
  • Take into account in your analysis basic relevant performance metrics, e.g., area (A), critical path delay (deduced from clock frequency) (D), Benchmarks Scores (BSs), energy consumption (E), as well as compound metrics, e.g., AD, ABS, E, and E*BS products.
  • 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.

Finally, summarize your work and add your conclusions and possible future work plans in the last report section. In this context you should also put things into perspective and include the following:

  • What was your initial plan;
  • What were your expectations;
  • What are the results and why are the results not according to the expectations in case they are not.

If you have any feedback for us, the course, you can also write this in your conclusion. This is not mandatory, though is greatly appreciated. This feedback does not count towards your grade in any way, though if you are worried that it has your name on it because the report does, we recommend you to fill in our evasys questionnaire which is 100% anynomous.

Some other issues you need to think about when writing your report:

  • The report should be consistent, in structure, language, and formatting style.
  • It is a common practice to make use of the present tense, with the exception of the conclusion section, where past tense should be employed.
  • Headings are written with capitals and numbered.
  • The text is usually justified.
  • References should be placed in a dedicated section at the end of the report.

See also: Submission Information