Abstract
As part of our ELEX 7660 Digital System Design course, we were to complete a final project based on the provided Terasic DE0-Nano-SoC FPGA development board. The project was primarily centered around digital hardware design rather than software for implementation. The project we chose was a laser transmission and tracking system which leverages the parallelism and deterministic timing capabilities of the FPGA to handle multiple channels of input in a predictable manner. Our final implementation of this project exclusively uses digital hardware design in its operation, with software only used during the debugging process of our development. As we primarily focused on the tracking feature, we could not complete the laser data transmission aspect of this project but did achieve the rest of our goals. The final implementation features hardware ADC sampling, fixed-point calculations, stepper driver addressing, and IR transmission. All modules of this project were developed independently, with the exception of the IP used in pushing the data out to UART during debugging.