TOP-DOWN EDUCATION FOR DIGITAL LOGIC DESIGN COURSE BASED ON CELLULAR METHODS

摘要

We propose a new top-down eLearning tool for hardware logic design course using the cellular method, where students can keep focusing on their primary interests to achieve complex logic circuits design successfully. At a modern logic design classroom, hardware description languages such as VerilogHDL are mostly used to describe circuits for FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). These HDL descriptions are wrapped in XML (Extensible Markup Language) with a specially arranged XML vocabulary, in order to share designed modules among students on the Web. Although XML gives us a common and convenient Web framework, it becomes difficult to verify and maintain conformance among designed modules if the system becomes very large. To overcome this problem, we employed the cellular models that ensure the consistency among design modules and support a top-down design methodology. The proposed system is expected to achieve higher efficiency for preparing logic design lecture courses. This paper presents the basic XML vocabulary design to describe hardware modules efficiently, and also presents a sample eLearning courseware on the Web employing this XML vocabulary.