Teaching Digital Design in the FPGA age

Description

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) are today a mainstream of digital design. The complexity of FPGA configuration process calls for the use of Hardware Description Languages and of sophisticated Electronic Design Automation tools and, therefore, today's digital designers must be trained accordingly. We present a new extension of our educational design suite for digital circuits, the Deeds. Using the extension, students may compile a project into an FPGA chip starting from Deeds, leaving in the background the operations performed by the FPGA-specific EDA tool. The extension is specifically conceived for introducing FPGA-based systems in a first course of digital design, avoiding a break of continuity with the pedagogical approach and the tools used.

Additional details