ASIC/FPGA Design and Verification Out Source Services

Digital Design Basics
Data Path and Control

1. A digital design architecture is usually built of two parts in order to facilitate its development, readability and later in the product life cycle its maintainability as well as its re usability.
2. First there is the data path. The data path blocks work on data and can be considered as workers in the assorted phases of a product in a factory.
3. Second building block of an architecture, is the control. The control is responsible to time each operation in data path.
   In my factory example, the control may be considered as the manager, which tells the workers, from the data path, what to do.




Some examples are given below:


4. Data path usually contain registers like: shift register to convert a serial stream to a parallel one (USB), or registers between stages in order to meet speed requirements.
   Arithmetic designs contain adders, multipliers, multiplexes et cetera...
5. The control may contain counters, state machines, tables et cetera...
   The next slide shows a design example.

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