18-643 Course Schedule, Fall 2026

Lecture notes are posted within 24 hours after the lecture; you may find it useful to preview lecture notes from Fall 2023 before class.
There are 4 2-week labs in the first half of the semester. There is a single project for the second half of the semester.
Please note the attendance-mandatory dates for the midterm, in-class project presentations, and in-class paper presentation. (Attendance of overflow presentations during recitation (if necessary) is not required.)
Go to the Course Home Page
Go to Canvas (Important: students on waitlist should email instructor for access to Canvas to begin Lab 0 immediately.)
Go to Piazza

Week	Date	L#	Topic	Readings	Lab Week
1	8/25	L1	Introduction	[Trimberger15] (skim [Tessier15] and [DeHon15])	Lab 0: Warm-Up
	8/27	L2	FPGA Basics	[Stratix II Performance and Logic Efficiency Analysis, 2005]
2	9/1	L3	FPGA Less Basic	[Boutros21]
	9/3	L4	Modern FPGAs	(skim [Chromczak20],[Ahmed16])
3	9/8	L5	Design Metrics	18447 [L5], [L12], [L23]	Lab 1: FPGA SoC
	9/10	L6	Abstract Models
4	9/15	L7	C-to-HW	[Edwards05]
	9/17	L8	Vivado HLS	The Zynq Book Ch 15
5	9/22	L9	Intel OpenCL		Lab 2: IP HLS
	9/24	L10	Memory Architecture
6	9/29	L11	Memory Techniques	(skim [Kung86] [Williams09])
	10/1	L12	Stream Data Processing	(skim [Mueller09]
7	10/6	L13	Midterm and Project Clinic		Lab 3: HW Acceleration
	10/8		Midterm
	10/13		Fall Break
	10/15		Fall Break
8	10/20	L14	Hard vs Soft Logic	(skim [Kuon06][Papamichael12]])
	10/22	L15	Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration	[Vipin18]
9	10/27		Term Project Proposal Student Presentations
	10/29		Term Project Proposal Student Presentations
10	11/3		Democracy Day (No Classes)
	11/5	S1	TBD	TBA
11	11/10	S2	TBD	TBA
	11/12	S3	TBD	TBA
12	11/17	S4	TBD	TBA
	11/19	S5	TBD	TBA
13	11/24	S6	TBD	TBA
	11/26		Thanksgiving (No Classes)
14	12/1	S7	TBD	TBA
	12/3	S8	TBD	TBA
finals week	12/7~ 12/13		Term Project Student Presentations (20 minutes scheduled slots)