A course in digital system design using unified E2LP platform

This paper presents a project based teaching experience in an advanced digital systems design course with emphasis on design methodologies and laboratory assignments. Projects are the core of the practised teaching methodology and are structured in a pedagogical format according to the course programme. The use of the FPGA technology as the most suitable implementation technology for digital design teaching purposes is discussed. The course structure, oriented to the development of real working digital systems, challenges the students and increases their motivation. This way, the learning process is improved and the classes are more productive. A laboratory development infrastructure based on a FPGA device, used to implement a real-time video processing system, is presented. Examples of laboratory projects implemented with this infrastructure in a recent course edition are also presented.

We describe our experience introducing DSP concepts via an FPGA-based advanced digital design course. The students had previously taken an introductory digital design course and a continuous-time linear systems course; a few were taking an introductory DSP course concurrently. Through a series of weekly lab exercises, the students learned advanced FPGA design methods while progressively constructing a SSB receiver for the 40-meter amateur radio band. The lab exercises introduced modulation, IQ signal representation, sampling, downconversion, frequency synthesis, CIC and FIR filters, and Hilbert transforms. The first offering of this course in Spring 2009 was successful and a repeat offering is planned for Spring 2011.

Incorporating VHDL programming and implementation using programmable logic devices (PLD) in fundamental digital design course for Electronics Engineering at undergraduate level has become increasingly essential. However it is experienced that integration of VHDL with fundamentals of digital design in one course students give lesser time and importance for VHDL programming. Hence learning objective related to VHDL programming is not achieved up to the expected level. Experience of giving additional training to interested students had shown improvement in students' performance. This paper discusses effect of designing of a separate compulsory laboratory course in VHDL and its effect on the understanding of students and achieving the learning objectives. It also discusses the effect on performance of students in Digital Design course after separating VHDL programming from it. The feedback of students shows that students learn better in laboratory course and they are motivated to learn further in the same area.

For some time now, the notion that "an algorithm is an algorithm" has been emphasized in digital system design. In approaching such design problems, the question of hardware versus software implementation of the algorithm should be left to the last. In fact, such approaches have not been viable until the advent of the microprocessor, and software design has seemingly gone its own way independently of hardware design. But has it really? It is becoming increasingly clear that structured approaches to the design of digital systems, hardware or software, have evolved in both areas and are virtually identical. It is possible to teach a course on digital system design so that a diverse group can understand and learn from each other's background. It is also possible to have a laboratory wherein realistic projects can be undertaken. In this paper, the digital system design sequence and laboratory facilities at Northwestern University will be discussed. Also, desirable design tools will be postulated.

Hardware software co-design is becoming increasingly important to the embedded systems industry. It will soon be fundamental to digital systems design. As such, students in electrical and computer engineering and in computer science should be introduced to hardware-software co-design early in their undergraduate education. We are designing laboratory modules which introduce concepts of hardware-software co-design in an undergraduate's first course on microcontrollers and digital systems design. Students use design automation tools to develop FPGA-based hardware for use with an 8051-microcontroller and use common software development tools to develop microcontroller software in C or assembly language. Co-simulation of hardware and software is enabled using a simulation model of the 8051 that we developed. Preliminary results are encouraging. Students who take the lab perform better in the associated lecture class than those who do not take the lab and appear to develop a greater appreciation for digital systems design. We believe such laboratories will be a common component of computer engineering classes in the future.

IntroductionThe conventional method for teaching removable partial denture (RPD) design using a pencil drawing on a solid cast has always been the basis for teaching RPD design in most dental schools at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. This does not apply to RPD fabrication technology, as more laboratories have recently adopted more efficient and versatile digital techniques to design and fabricate RPD frameworks.MethodsAt the University of Iowa College of Dentistry, we created a pilot workshop to assess the efficiency of a new approach to teaching RPD design utilizing this new digital RPD technology as a teaching tool for graduate prosthodontics residents. Three first-year prosthodontics residents were enrolled in the workshop, which involved learning the new digital workflow of designing RPD.ResultsThis new teaching approach very successfully achieved its educational goals. The residents reported that the digital RPD teaching approach enriched their knowledge and deepened their understanding of RPD design.DiscussionThe technique garnered significant interest from the students and seemed to also increase their understanding of the steps involved in RPD fabrication as well as the different components of the RPD.

This paper describes the development of courses in the field of digital design that use Arduino boards as their main platforms. Arduino offers an intuitive development environment and multiple hardware and software resources that allow rapid development of microcontroller-based projects. However, due to the vast amount of information available, students were losing the capability to design their own prototypes. We propose a methodology that introduces the study of microcontrollers using Arduino to develop different types of projects and proceeds to study the system architecture to gain control on the device. This methodology has been used in an undergraduate course in microcontrollers and a graduate course in advanced techniques in digital design. The students of the microcontrollers course showed improved design skills and motivation compared to the students from previous versions of the course. With respect to the advanced techniques in digital design course, the students were able to take advantage of Arduino platform to gain a deep understanding of hardware/software co-design of embedded systems.

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.

This paper describes our innovative design efforts of a modern digital design course. The main feature that differentiates our efforts from other similar works is that we have divided both the knowledge and the learners into three categories, and clarified the corresponding relations between them. By elaborate planning for the contents, schedule, teaching, and testing, plus advanced instructional design and post evaluation, the course can satisfy the needs of a large range of learners with different inclinations.

Modern society life is inextricably linked with the digital environment. A consequence is the transformation of ergatic systems into digital ones. The result is the emergence of new types of man-machine interaction. The essential feature of such interaction is to minimise human involvement in the ergatic system functioning. According to this, the issues of organising the safe and effective functioning of digital ergatic systems have priority importance. In this regard, the aim was to study the features of man-machine interaction in an actual digital ergatic system. We chose an ergatic system for research. The main elements of the system were students (70 people of the first-year study) and teachers (5 people) of the Simon Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics, as well as the digital system “Personal training systems the Simon Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics” (PTS). This digital system is an adapted model of the Moodle digital system. The study found out that the key components that determine the safety and efficiency of the digital ergatic system are the operator's digital mindset, digital tools and digital devices. The study of these components in the system made it possible to establish that it had a balanced state. It is substantiated the optimal form of man-machine interaction in the system. It is mixed learning. It is shown that the tendency to minimise the human role in a digital ergatic system does not always have the expected positive result, which determines the need for further research on this issue. In addition, we analysed the difficulties arising in the design of digital systems. The main reason for this is a lack of developers awareness of the ergonomic and cognitive aspects of man-machine interaction. It is shown that the development of critical thinking and intuition in students is closely related to the individual trajectory of learning. For this, it is essential to update interdisciplinary knowledge. In this case, it is necessary to familiarise students with current concepts and system-forming principles, which are the basis of human factors engineering. It was substantiated that the application of current concepts and system-forming principles in training will allow optimising man-machine interaction. The positive results will be evidence even at the stage of designing digital systems

The objective of this mixed research is to analyze the impact of flipped classroom in the educational process on the Combinational Circuits through data science and machine learning. Flipped classroom facilitates the organization of active activities before, during and after the class. The participants are 17 students of Electronic Electrical Engineering who took the Digital Design course in the National Autonomous University of Mexico during the 2019 school year. The results of machine learning indicate that the consultation of the videos before the class, resolution of the exercises during the class through the Quartus software and realization of the laboratory practices after the class positively influence the development of skills on circuit design. Data science identifies 3 predictive models of the use of flipped classroom through the decision tree technique. Finally, teachers can improve the learning process, develop the skills of students, build new educational spaces and carry out creative activities through flipped classroom.

A new distance learning system, integrating a top-down design support system and a multi-user/multi-test-bed remote laboratory system for digital circuit hardware design and implementation course, is realized. The proposed system employs the hardware description language (VerilogHDL) for the design database and FPGAs for design implementation test-beds. Students using this remote laboratory system at remote sites can perform actual hardware experiments in parallel. It realized a remote multi-user time-sharing hardware experiment system. It has achieved seamless remotes and actual hardware laboratories, which resolve conflicts among users, when many users request the same services at the same time. The top-down design support system guides students to complete projects. The course material database is organized in the form of a design-module-cell hierarchy tree, where each design-module-cell contains a sample circuit design, described in VerilogHDL. The use of XNIL wrapped VerilogHDL descriptions and specially extended XNIL vocabularies contributed to share designed modules among students and teachers as well across the Internet via the Web. The prototype of the distance learning system, integrating both the digital circuit design support system using top-down approach and the multi-user remote laboratory system for running experiment of digital circuit, has been developed. It has achieved an effective and efficient distance learning system.

Learning digital systems design is a difficult skill that students of Bachelors on Computer Science, Electronic Engineering or Telecommunications have to acquire in the initial courses. The problem aggravates when the student is learning in a virtual environment with no face-to-face interaction with the instructor. In this case, simulators or intelligent tutoring systems, such as Veril UOC [1], are used in order to acquire this skill. This paper describes several improvements introduced in the instructor view of this framework Veril UOC. The new information that can be extracted of the system can improve the personalized feedback that the instructor can perform to the students, and, at the same time, the real-time information gives insights related to the course's operation.

Digital integrated circuit design serves as a crucial required course for students majoring in electronic science and technology. This subject combines theoretical knowledge with practical applications, playing a key role in establishing a strong foundation for students’ academic and career growth. Guided by the OBE concept, the reform of digital integrated circuit design aims to transcend traditional limitations, explore more efficient and high-quality teaching methods, and cultivate outstanding talents according to predefined goals, enabling them to meet job market demands and adapt to industry changes. To enhance the training model for professional talents in electronic science and technology and support the long-term development and planning of students, this approach achieves multiple objectives simultaneously. Consequently, this paper explores the essence of the OBE concept and provides an in-depth analysis of the current state and potential reform directions for the digital integrated circuit design course, aiming to offer valuable insights for educators on the front lines.

In teaching undergraduate courses in digital logic design, it has been traditional to have hardware laboratories using logic boards or programmable FPGA boards. In these settings, students physically wire sample designs from a problem set, and present the finished product for verification to a lab instructor, together with testing the chips themselves and acquiring the experience of hands-on hardware. Many digital logic design courses have switched to using only software simulators or VHDL-based exercises, often due to lack of resource allocations. We have designed and implemented a multimedia-based virtual lab, which allows the students to practice on their design, explore in a tutorial fashion various options, and gives them as close as possible a real hands-on experience, through the use of a "virtual board" and links to background tutorial material which can be customized.