A rapid prototyping environment for teaching digital logic design

Abstract

In this paper, the authors present a rapid prototyping environment for teaching digital logic design. Their primary goal was to build an FPGA based hardware prototyping system that provides sufficient flexibility for the implementation and functional verification of various digital circuit designs. Since the system is intended to be used as an experimental and demonstration board to support digital design courses and practices for the undergraduate students, it is simple to use and completely supported by the software for automatic implementation of digital circuits. The prototyping environment consists of a PC and the programmable board composed of 3 FPGAs. One FPGA is used to implement the digital circuit, while the rest of the devices implement an interface between the digital circuit and the PC. The PC is used for designing a digital circuit, automatic generation of the interface logic, programming the FPGAs and as a test engine for functional verification of the designed circuit. The presented environment is used in the regular educational process and the sample student projects are summarized.