Design of the Hadamard Coprocessor with the Alliance Cad System Carried by Post-graduating Students

University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris, offers a one-year course on Advanced CAD and VLSI design for post graduate students (DEA ASIME, DESS CISAN). This course starts with a general introduction to circuit and system architecture and a presentation of ALLIANCE[1], the educational CAD system developed by the ASIM team of the university. This first part lasts 4 weeks and aims to settle the basic knowledge necessary to follow a more specific course focusing on either CAD tools design, Circuit design , or System design. In between, a 3-weeks project is proposed to allow the students practicing the concepts presented earlier. Depending on the students option, the project consists in implementing either a MIPS R3000[2] or the Hadamard coprocessor[3]. This paper presents the Hadamard project with a special focus on the methodology followed by the students from specification to layout.