DIGITAL DESIGN PROJECT COMPETITION USING ADVANCED FPGA TECHNOLOGY AND HARDWARE DESCRIPTIVE LANGUAGES

摘要

The majority of the undergraduate engineering courses in hardware areas such as Digital Design sequence of courses covers theory and usually have integrated laboratory, evaluating students' knowledge through exams, home-works, and practical laboratory exams. However, there is still a tremendous need for more innovative methods to reinforce the students' technical and practical knowledge, to meet all the learning objectives and to better prepare the students for the global industry's needs. Trying to organize and to integrate in a very packed curriculum a Digital Design Project Competition open to students presently and formerly enrolled in Digital Design courses is the idea being addressed in this paper. This paper presents the results of the on-going efforts trying to organize first edition of such a competition at Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, IN. The competition is sponsored by Digilent, Inc., Pullman, WA, a company producing state of the art FPGA boards. The emphasis of the competition is on conceptual design, implementation and validation of the projects using FPGA boards and Verilog as HDL.