Developing Project Based Course Using a Hardware Description Language

This paper describes a course about very high speed integrated circuit hardware description language (VHDL) that was designed and taught to seniors and graduate students at the University of Detroit Mercy. The course motivation is to bridge the gap that students encounter when getting involved in the design of digital circuitry in the workplace. This course prepares them adequately to learn the hardware description language VHDL and be able to use state-of-the-art tools to design, simulate and build real-world circuits and systems. This saves them around six months in effective work time, and provides them with maturity to solve real world problems. The course uses development boards based on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which enable students to perform rapid prototyping and verification of their projects. When application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are the ultimate goal, the replacement of any code that includes an FPGA primitive instantiation becomes necessary. On the other hand, current FPGAs speed of 500 MHz and high density at a continually lower cost, make it less compelling to use ASICs in many situations