Course on digital electronics oriented to describing systems in VHDL

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. F. J. Azcondo, Á. de Castro, C. Brañas, "Course on Digital Electronics Oriented to Describing Systems in VHDL", IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, vol. 57, no. 10, pp. 3308 - 3316, October 2010A new orientation for a multidisciplinary industrial engineering program course on digital electronics is proposed. Students are trained to describe complete systems in very high speed integrated circuit hardware description language (VHDL). These systems have been previously modeled with Matlab/Simulink, including both continuous and discrete components. Digital controllers based on concurrent hardware are designed for these systems in the same framework. After developing and simulating the behavioral model of the system or plant, the controller is redescribed under the synthesis constraints and implemented in a field-programmable gate array evaluation board for verification, along with the system under control. In this way, the course is not only intended for digital electronics specialists but also for students with diverse engineering backgrounds.This work has been supported by the TEC2008-01753 projects TIN2009-07333-E/TSI of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovatio