A physical test environment is required for ASIC devices fabricated following tape out. The nanoSoC test board provides a complete test environment for ASIC designs based on the nanoSoC reference design and enables the showcase of any custom designs that utilise it.  Reviewing the function of nanoSoC identifies a number of design criteria for the test board:

The Arm PL022 provides an interface for synchronous serial communication with peripheral devices connected to the  SoC via the Advanced Peripheral Bus (APB). It supports a choice of interface operation, Motorola compatible Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), National Semiconductor Microwire, or Texas Instruments synchronous serial interface. See the Techology page for details. 

To design and verify a simple PLL for use as generator of clock signals in System on Chip design. The desired outcome from this project should be the following:

The resulting IP for these component blocks will be made available to the soclabs community for the upcoming design contest.

The dynamic range processor is a DSP function which does as it says on the tin; it compresses the dynamic range of the incoming signal. This is used most commonly in the music industry for its effects on the perceived loudness of audio. It is also used extensively in hearing aids to compensate for the user’s reduced dynamic range of hearing. In this project a hardware accelerator is developed for the purpose of dynamic range compression of digital audio. This accelerator will be implemented in a mixed-signal infrastructure.