Imposing a unified design methodology on independent rapid prototyping tools

The teaching of digital design requires a design platform which presents a coherent design methodology to the students. Yet we found ourselves with diflerent tools and hardware subsystems, each having its own idea about what digital design was about. Here we record our eflort t o forge a single design platform for beginning designers from three separate software subsystems and two hardware subsystems. In the process we developed software which not only smoothed out the design pow, but also fir’led in some glaring gap:$ in the platform’s functionality which had not been provided by any vendor. The insight gained from the exercise i s mflected in a ‘wish-list” of features which we hope will be provided by vendors in the near future.