Ideas for Improving the Digital Design Lab

Abstract

In all undergraduate programs related to electrical, electronics and computer engineering, a lab course on Digital Logic design is invariably included. The experiments in this lab class require the student to build combinational and sequential circuits using TTL integrated circuits such as gates and flip-flops. Some autonomous institutions have included hardware description language tools in the syllabus. In the past two years, due to the “online” teaching that educational institutions have resorted to, access to labs became impossible. In this paper, we propose the use of high-level programming languages like C or Python to carry out design and simulation experiments. Due to reasons such as cost and the learning curve associated with them, HDL tools are hard to integrate into a digital lab. Modern FPGA, with gate capacities of millions of gates, are suited for teaching Computer Architecture, but are overkill for an introductory digital lab. Schematic capture tools with a graphical user interface are an alternate, but the existing experiments in the syllabi are rarely able to exploit their capabilities. The use of complex tool environments may be distracting and may pose impediments to the learning. We suggest the use of simpler programming tools so that the focus on design is restored. We also explain how these tools can also be used creatively to touch on topics such as design verification, validation, and testing.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital lab
• Teaching aid
• Undergraduate lab

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

C. P. Ravikumar

C P Ravikumar received his BE degree in electronics engineering from Bangalore University in 1983 and ME degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, in 1987. He received his PhD degree in computer engineering from the Department of EE-Systems, University of Southern California, in 1991. He was a professor of electrical engineering at IIT Delhi (1991–2001) and is currently the director of Technical Talent Development at Texas Instruments, India. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and a Fellow of INAE.