Integrating Industry Cae Tools and Vhdl into Digital Systems Design Courses

The drastic advances in semiconductor technology in the last decade have made field programmable logic devices (FPLDs) with tens of millions gates common place integrated logic circuits. To allow designers to cope and use these high density FPLDs (densities are still growing) and associated increasingly sophisticated computer-aided engineering (CAE) logic development tools, higher level of abstraction and hierarchy in design description have become the rule to digital systems designers. In this context, Universities’ curricula have to adapt to these changes either by incorporating new courses or by updating existing ones. This paper describes the one-year digital systems design course updated in 2004/2005 at Boumerdes’ University. In this course, we integrated field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), the IEEE standard language VHDL and the industry most widely used programmable logic development toolset on PC station, Altera’s Max+Plus II. In the first part of the course, and beside teaching logic design basics with hands-on experiments using the TTL 74xxx series on the protoboard, VHDL was integrated throughout the course by means of simple tutorial examples. In the second part, and as students gained sufficient familiarity with the hardware/software development systems capabilities, students were taught design techniques based on the top-down methodology through hands-on experiments using an CPLD/FPGA-based platform development board. In this part, we did exploit VHDL constructs to make a design reusable, and hence demonstrate how digital design and rapid prototyping are facilitated by FPGAs and VHDL.