The aim is to assess the understanding and the degree of completion of the labs in the first part of the term. You are expected to demonstrate your understanding of the various concepts introduced in the labs, as well as the degree of completion of the various labs. Also, you are expected to discuss/justify your design choices (where this is applicable). The assessment will take place as a group, but individual marks will be awarded. The expectation is that all team members will engage with the examination, and different marks can be allocated to members of the team if it is deemed necessary.
The assessment will take place during the midterm week. The orals will take place with either the module lecturer or a GTA, and a moderation will take place across the groups.
Each group will have a 20-minute oral slot, of which 15 minutes are dedicated to questions about all the various things you have seen in the lab, where the last 5 minutes will be used for feedback and discussion.
You should demonstrate to the marking team that:
- Your system works
- What is the end-to-end latency of your system (from speak-llm-listen)?
- What improvements have you made to improve this end-to-end latency performance?
- What evaluation have you done to evaluate your improvements?
These questions might include:
- Understanding of an FPGA device.
- Understanding of the FPGA design process
- Explaining parts of the code related to what you have developed in the labs
- Describing the functionality of the various hardware components that you have used in the lab.
- Discuss various design approaches you have seen in the lab.
The questions will be taken from a pre-determined question-bank, though the questions may be modulated to customise them for each session. This is an oral, so the answering of questions is inherently interactive, and the interviewer may ask clarifying follow-ups, give hints, ask for expansion of certain aspects of the response, etc.
In general, anyone in the group can answer questions, but effort will be placed for everyone to have the opportunity to speak. During the oral anyone in the group can use any tool or resource to try to answer the question including web searches. However, given the time available and the need to explain your answers, you'll mostly just need to "know" the answers (which is kind of the point of an oral).
The answer to each question will be assessed as:
- Not satisfactory : 0 marks
- Partial answer : 1 marks
- Satisfactory answer : 2 mark
- Excellent answer : 3 marks