Enhancing the Hardware Design Experience for Computer Engineers

People become engineers because they love to build things. Although real engineering is comprised of designing new things, maintaining old things and redesigning things, the engineering student gets very little exposure to these activities. The main reason for this is the time and expense necessary to create a realistic engineering environment in the educational laboratory. With the recent progress in design automation tools, it is now possible to revise the core computer engineering curriculum to include realistic design experiences in virtually all courses, even those that are not usually thought of as being laboratory courses. Recently, we have established a new instructional philosophy for our computer engineering program that states that each classroom topic will be reinforced with a realistic design experience. In a traditional hardware laboratory, this would be virtually impossible due to the time and expense involved in setting up such a laboratory. However, design automation tools have elevated hardware design to the level of software design, at least in terms of the complexity of the designs that can be created in a given amount of time. Because of this we can assign a large number of simple design exercises in the low-level courses, and a few more complex projects in the later courses. This paper describes the changes that we have made in three of our core courses, Logic Design, Computer Architecture, and Digital System Design. These changes are all based around a common set of tools that will be used throughout the curriculum. Several design exercises are described, along with a suggested sequence for the various exercises. We have developed several laboratory manuals that can be used with a typical textbook. In the references we provide pointers to web sites where our laboratory manuals and tools can be downloaded. We also provide suggestions for textbooks for each course, although we expect our materials to be useful with a wide variety of texts. We also report some of our experience in using these materials in the classroom, and the student reaction to these changes.