Ethan James, Eddie Pritchard

Eddie Pritchard

In Progress

This is a digital audio workstation - a tool that allows musicians or audio engineers to record, process, and mix audio digitally. It uses a very low cost microcontroller to handle basic IO and a low-cost FPGA to handle digital signal processing and read/write from storage and RAM. Data storage is provided by an SD card. Dynamic memory is provided by an 8MB Psuedo-static RAM (PSRAM), which is a DRAM IC with a memory controller attached to eliminate the need to constantly refresh the memory. This gives us a decent amount of capacity without requring a complex memory interface.

This project focuses on two engineering topics - digital design and digital signal processing. Creating the interface between storage (SD card), RAM, microcontroller, and digital signal processing requires us to make careful decisions when writing Verilog/SystemVerilog HDL. Designing audio effects for the digital signal processor requires fairly deep knowledge of DSP theory and the ability to implement DSP algorithms in physical hardware (possibly including FFT/IFFT).

Important Numbers

List of IPs currently in development:

• SD card controller
• Audio DSP core
• SPI/QPI PSRAM Controller

List of micocontroller software modules currently in development:

• SD card driver
• Memory allocator
• FAT filesystem (using FatFs as a starting point)

Documentation (WIP)

Version History