Integrating digital logic design and assembly programming using FPGAs in the classroom

Rising Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) market volumes combined with increasing industrial popularity have driven prices down and improved capability to the point that FPGA hardware and development environments afford academia the unique opportunity to embrace this technology not only in specialized graduate-level courses, but also across many of the courses of a traditional undergraduate computer science curriculum. We have begun adapting several of our undergraduate computer science courses and associated laboratories to make use of FPGAs as a common platform of instruction. In this paper, we illustrate how to make use of FPGAs in courses that cover digital logic design and assembly programming while discussing some of the pro’s and con’s of their use. We also provide a detailed discussion of a laboratory project that integrates both assembly programming as well as digital logic design in such a way that allows the student to perform a trade-off analysis between using soft...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ACMSE
• Authors: William M. Jones, D. Brian Larkins
• Keywords: ACMSE 2011, Computer Science Curriculum, Digital Logic Design, Programmable Gate Array, Theoretical Computer Science