COMP4601 Notices

Notices

  • Personal reflections due at 5pm today

    Posted by Oliver Diessel Monday 11 August 2025, 03:06:28 PM.

    Could I please ask you all to send me your reflections by 5pm today?

    I will be working my way through these and your project submissions in the next period. Please keep an eye on your email in case I contact you if I'm unable to access your submissions.

  • Team presentations, reports and videos

    Posted by Oliver Diessel Thursday 07 August 2025, 03:56:15 PM.

    Could I please remind all project teams to post their final presentations, reports and demonstration videos to their project websites for marking by tomorrow evening. Thanks a lot!

  • Week 10 presentation schedule

    Posted by Oliver Diessel Monday 28 July 2025, 03:59:14 PM, last modified Monday 28 July 2025, 04:01:34 PM.

    As briefly touched on today, a schedule for the Week 10 project presentations is needed.

    The following project teams will present next Monday commencing at 11AM:

    1. Keccak-based Bitcoin Miner , Desmond Loh, Jack Wang, Felix Li & Thenuja Wijesuriya
    2. Matrix Multiplication , Varun Sethu, Trent Zang, Aditi Sachan & Kiattechin Rungruengsakorn

    The teams presenting on Wednesday at 11AM will be:

    1. Convolutional Neural Network , Ezekiel Tay, Kenneth Law, Sicheng Jin
    2. SHA3-224 Accelerator , Ashleigh Grabow, James Milosavljevic, Benedict Pamittan & Michelle Wong
    3. AES Encryption , Alyssa Lubrano, Linfeng Cai, Kavisha Chandraratne & Idriz Haxhimolla

  • handin05 marked

    Posted by Oliver Diessel Friday 25 July 2025, 05:26:30 PM.

    The last handin has been marked. Feedback can be collected. Let me know of any errors. Have a good weekend!

  • SD cards only needed to implement an OS on the PS

    Posted by Oliver Diessel Monday 21 July 2025, 05:04:29 PM.

    Please be advised that you will not need SD cards for your Kria boards if you are aiming to impelment a bare metal system (one without an OS such as Petalinux running on the PS). Implementing a bare metal system avoids the complexity of customising and implementing an OS, but you will not have a file system available. However, if you prefer to have Petalinux or Ubuntu running on your PS, then you will need to purchase an SD card.

    Tony has volunteered to be available for a virtual lab at 2PM on Wednesday to walk interested students through the bare metal approach to implementing systems. This walkthrough will also be recorded.

  • Project Investigation slides

    Posted by Oliver Diessel Wednesday 16 July 2025, 01:25:10 PM.

    Thanks very much for the effort you put into your presentations - I enjoyed the series! Would you please ensure that you have linked your presentations to your project web sites so that I can take another look?

    Thanks!

  • handin04 marks released

    Posted by Oliver Diessel Tuesday 15 July 2025, 03:40:51 PM.

    General feedback from Cha-Wei, who marked this handin:

    Varun Sethu and Trent Zeng used Vitis HLS to complete the lab exercises.

    There were many AI-assisted answers. They were mostly too generic and did not answer the questions explicitly.

    Some students did not provide the AI tool with enough information (e.g. not giving the AI the full HLS report or the schedule), leading to incorrect explanations generated.

  • handin03 marks released

    Posted by Oliver Diessel Tuesday 15 July 2025, 03:16:28 PM.

    General feedback from Tony, who marked this handin:

    Here is how I allocated marks:

    • Part 1 (/2):
      • 1 mark for correct results
      • 1 mark for explanation (i.e. Fixed point is cheaper than floating point arithmetic)
    • Part 2 (/2):
      • 1 mark for correct results
      • 1 mark for explanation (i.e. Shift+add is cheaper than full multiplication)
    • Part 3 (/4):
      • 1 mark for explanation of schedule
      • 1 mark for explanation for unroll by factor 2
      • 1 mark for explanation of unroll by factor 4
      • 1 mark for explanation of pipelining.
    • Part 4 (/2):
      • 1 mark for comment on initial values of current_cos and current_sin, AND comment on cordic_phase array.
      • 1 mark for comment on the relationship between NUM_ITERATIONS and bit-width of the datatype.

    The marks are skewed high. With the help of chatgpt most students are able to provide sensible answers for most questions. However, there are instances where chatgpt may have gotten them confused or provided the wrong answer.

    For example:

    • Student A
      • Stated for Part 4 --- "Reducing the number of iterations decreases the area usage slightly but has no impact on the throughput." --- although from their HLS report, the initiation interval decreases from 65 -> 33 -> 17. This leads me to think they still don't understand what throughput means as a 4 th year student or they got confused by an incorrect AI summary or interpreted it incorrectly.
    • Student B
      • Mixed up solution 1h and 1e and was attributing properties that belonged to 1h when describing 1e and vice versa. I'm not certain if this is due to AI, but it seems odd and shows a lack of understanding.
    • Student C
      • Wrote some gibberish for a section of Part 4:1/K≈0.607251/K≈0.607251/K≈0.607251/K≈0.8581/K≈0.8581/K≈0.858. They likely copied and pasted this without a second look, given the repeating symbols, and also, it's wrong.
    • Student D
      • Stated for Part 2: --- "estimated clock frequency is much lower", whereas they should have said the estimated clock period is much lower. I hope 4 th year student knows the difference between period and frequency. I don't know if they were just copy and pasting an AI summary, but it's a little suspicious.

  • Week 7 Project Presentations

    Posted by Oliver Diessel Thursday 03 July 2025, 02:28:41 PM, last modified Thursday 03 July 2025, 02:29:09 PM.

    I have now asked one group (Rungruengsakorn, Sachan, Sethu, Zeng) to present at 12 pm on Monday 14 July in SEB G07. Please show your support by attending.

    The other four groups will present commencing at 11 am on Wednesday 16 July in OMB 150. These groups are:

    1. Jin, Law, Tay
    2. Grabow, Milosavljevic, Pamittan, Wong
    3. Cai, Chandraratne, Haximolla, Lubrano
    4. Li, Loh, Wang, Wijesuriya

    Groups will present in the above order. All students are expected to attend and contribute to their group's presentation.

  • COMP4601 Wiki available now

    Posted by Oliver Diessel Tuesday 01 July 2025, 11:29:41 AM.

    The link to the COMP4601 Wiki should now work for all people associated with the course. Please login with your zID and zPass, and if you are presented with a You are not allowed to view this page error message, click on the Frontpage tab that appears directly below the university crest on the Wiki login page.

    The Wiki provides links to the projects undertaken in previous years, and in many case provides you with access to their final reports. This resource may be of help in formulating your ideas and strategies for undertaking the project.

  • handin02 feedback and marks available

    Posted by Oliver Diessel Friday 27 June 2025, 04:57:14 PM.

    Tony has finished the marking for handin02, so please checkout how you did.

    His overall comments were:

    There seem be to quite a few ChatGPT assisted submissions, however they were generally pretty good. Hopefully the students learned something from asking AI.

    Special mention to Trent Zeng, Varun Sethu and Jack Wang for trying out Vitis. The results are quite different from Vivado, but they made an effort in their explanations.

  • Meet during lecture time this Wednesday for one-on-one project guidance

    Posted by Oliver Diessel Tuesday 17 June 2025, 10:00:24 AM.

    While there won't be a lecture tomorrow, I'll be in the OMB150 lecture theatre to talk with project groups who may wish to discuss their ideas with me. See you then.

  • Week 1 update notice and announcements

    Posted by Oliver Diessel Friday 06 June 2025, 02:27:17 PM.

    1. The Week 2 lab handin exercise sheet has been updated. Check the revision date in the top-right corner to determine whether the exercise sheet you are looking at is the latest.
    2. Tony has offered to make himself available on Teams from 2-4pm on the coming Monday (usual lab time) to answer any questions you have not just about the lab but anything else to do with the course. You should have received an invite to the COMP4601 25T2 Team and the links to virtual lab classes are in the correspondingly named channel.
    3. Chia-Wei has also offered to meet with anyone online from 10-11am and 1-2pm next Wednesday should you need help with the lab or anything else to do with the course.
    4. The Seminar pages have been updated to reflect the class size. The Moodle page to make a seminar selection will be open from 9am Tuesday 10 June until 5pm Friday 13 June. You may change your selection if you wish and there is availability in the seminar you wish to change to.
    5. The Project pages have also been updated. Note particularly the changes to the project deliverables and due dates for 2025.
    6. Please note that you are expected to attend lecture classes during Weeks 7 - 10.

Back to top

COMP4601 25T2 (Design Project B) is powered by WebCMS3
CRICOS Provider No. 00098G