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Digital Design Project Competition using Advanced FPGA Technology and Hardware Descriptive Languages

Abstract

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 needs5.

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.

Introduction

As the complexity of microelectronic systems is steadily increasing, the universities have to adapt their curricula to cope with the demands of research and development of future systems. So it is important that the students learn to use industrial tools and state of the art technology early in the curriculum. Continual advances in technology necessitate on-going updates and modifications to existing digital design teaching methods, techniques, so we try this new concept- a digital contest- in order to reinforce students’ technical and practical knowledge, to meet all the learning objectives and to better prepare them for the demanding industry’s needs1.

Trying to organize and to integrate in a very packed curriculum a Digital Design Project Competition open to Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science students is the idea being addressed in this paper.

Background and Motivation

The idea of the competition was inspired by a similar and very successful experience in a European University, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. At this university, two editions of a Digital Design contest were organized with extremely good results. They were sponsored by the same company, Digilent, Inc., as at RHIT. Students entered the competition with very creative and mature projects, and the results were beyond the expectations of local professors and sponsors, who traveled all the way from USA, to the city of Cluj, to attend the final phase of the competition and judge the students’ projects.

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Radu, M., & Cole, C., & Dabacan, M. (2007, June), Digital Design Project Competition Using Advanced Fpga Technology And Hardware Descriptive Languages Paper presented at 2007 Annual Conference & Exposition, Honolulu, Hawaii. 10.18260/1-2--2159