Project reports can be difficult to write. Often students find themselves restating material from the project assignment and writing text that seems boring and obvious. This is due in part to the fact that engineering professors don’t often push their students to write well and don’t spend time teaching students how to write. With a little time and effort, however, a good project report can be of great value to both the student and the professor.
This document defines the requirements and grading for the project report. The overall requirement is that it should be well-written, which means that it should contain an introduction, body, and conclusion. The introduction should prepare the reader for what she or he is about to read by summarizing the main findings in words that do not assume familiarity with the body.
The introduction should also introduce the organization of the report, similar to the following paragraph. The body should provide the details, and the conclusion should summarize the main findings in a few sentences.
The rest of this report is organized as follows. Section 2 provides the main goals of this report, in order to help you understand the spirit of what is being asked of you. Section 3 discusses the grading of the project, detailing how points will be assigned. Section 4 discusses the length requirements, and section 5 provides the conclusions. Additionally, an appendix is required to summarize the details of your design.
The number of body sections in your report is up to you, but it must contain an introduction, body, conclusion, and the appendix.
The goal of this report is not only to give you practice writing, but also to provide a written record of what you learned from the experience. The record is helpful to the instructor of the course, because it allows me to determine the quality of the assignment. That is, your report should tell me whether or not you
1.
learned what I wanted you to learn and
2.
did what I wanted you to do.
What I want you to learn is how to manage the complexity of your assigned system. I can’t tell you specifically how to write this, because every engineer handles complexity differently.
Also, if I gave you specific details about what include, then the only thing I would be encouraging you to learn is how to repeat what I say. Instead, I want to see that you’re teaching yourself how to manage complexity. Therefore, what I most want to know is what you discovered through the course of the project that you didn’t expect when you started. More specifically, I want to know things that you discovered that weren’t in any of the course
Page 1 of 4

materials (lecture notes, homework assignments, or project assignment). There are many different ways for this project to turn out, so you may choose to focus on things that might differentiate your project from others. Some examples of things that tend to differ are the number of logic element, memory blocks, registers, tri-state buffers, and warning/error messages in your synthesis results, the number of test-benches you wrote for your regression tests, and the exact cycle-to-cycle behavior of certain signals in the system. You may repeat text from the course materials if necessary, but this will not help your grade and may reduce it if you quote too much (see section 4. below).
I will judge how well you have learned to manage complexity by the technical depth of your report. Technical depth refers to how interesting your report is. If your report sounds boring to you when you read it, then I will probably think that it is, too.
I will judge whether or not you have done what I wanted you to do by the Appendix, which summarizes statistics of your design. Certain statistics should vary from person to person, and so this section is used to ensure that your design is not copied from other students. This section will be graded according to the completeness of the information you provide, that is, whether or not you included everything I asked for. Your appendix should adhere as closely as possible to the format of the appendix in this document for full credit. Note that your appendix should start a new page.
It is worthy to note that this report need not only be written for the benefit of the instructor, but may also be of benefit to you yourself. You may find yourself in a year or two trying to design a similar system, and may have forgotten some of the important lessons that you learned.
If you write this report well, it could serve as a fast, efficient way to remind you of those important lessons. In fact, I would suggest that you do write your report in this way, because it will be easier than trying to second-guess what I want to hear.
The break-down of points for each aspect of your project is given below, along with details about how the total will be calculated.

(10 points) Technical Depth – Technical depth was discussed in section 2 above.
Refer to that section for more details.

(10 points) Readability – Readability refers to how easy it is to read your report.
High marks will be given for reports that are well organized, brief, and flow easily from one section to the next. Points will be deducted for reports that are too long
(see section 3 below), or contain grammatical or spelling errors.

(10 points) Attractiveness – How attractive is the document to look at. Formatting options such as indentation, justified paragraphs, and appropriate use of spaces, numbers, bullets, bold and italic text can go a long way towards making your report easy to digest. Screen-shots of waveforms can be particularly ugly if they have black backgrounds and/or include unnecessary graphics from SimVision. It’s much better to export waveforms to an encapsulated PostScript file for inclusion in your report.

(30 points) Completeness of design statistics – Does your appendix contain all of the data requested in this document’s appendix? Also, does your appendix adhere to the requested format?
Page 2 of 4


(10 points) Completeness of code – Did your Wolfware-submitted code contain all of the modules in the system?

(10 points) Originality of code – Did you use the code for the Controller, Execute, and/or Fetch block from the homework solutions in the code that you turned in?

(10 points) Correct execution of proj1.dat
– Does your code run correctly on the proj1.dat file that was provided?

(10 points) Correct execution of second program – Does your code run correctly on a second program that will not be given to you?

(-20 points) Late Penalty – Late projects will be penalized 5 points per day until the complete project is turned in, up to a maximum of 20 points.

(100 points total)
Your report should be only as long as necessary to say what you want to say. Reports that ramble without getting to the point will be given low marks for readability. If you find that you are repeating text in the report, then you are probably in danger of rambling. Excessive brevity, however, may make the report confusing and can also reduce readability.
I would suggest around two total pages of text, single spaced with 12-point type, with one or two total pages of figures, plus the appendix. If you’re having trouble condensing your thoughts into two pages, you may go as high as three, but please don’t write more than that. Don’t feel that you need to fill up two pages, either. A shorter report can receive higher marks for readability.
This document has presented the format for the ECE 406-001 project reports. The goal of the report was presented, stating that the technical depth of the report would be determined by how well you have described aspects of the design process that were surprising and differentiating. The grading scale of the project was presented, along with details about how each set of points would be determined. Finally, you are urged to keep the report brief.
Page 3 of 4

ECE 406-001
Project #1 Statistics
Your Name Here
March 19, 2009
Points Originality
/ 4 Did you use the Controller from the HW#5 solution (yes/no)?
/ 3 Did you use the Fetch Block from the HW#6 solution (yes/no)?
/ 3 Did you use the Execute Block from the HW#6 solution (yes/no)?
Points Synthesis Results
/ 5 Number of logic elements
/ 5 Number of registers:
/ 5 Number of tri-state buffers:
/ 5 Number of memory bits:
/ 10 Please attach to the end of this report a print-out of all text from the Analysis and Synthesis
Messages section of your .map.rpt
file. If you have warnings and/or errors, please provide your best one- or two- sentence explanation for why each warning or error is occurring.
/ 40 Total for Originality and Design Statistics
Points Execution graded by:
/ 10 All modules included in proj1.v
/ 10 Correct execution of proj1.dat
/ 10 Correct execution of second program
/ 30 Total for Wolfware submission
Points
/ 10 Technical Depth
/ 10 Readability
/ 10 Attractiveness
/ 100 Total for Project
Element
Page 4 of 4