First Course in VHDL Modeling and FPGA Synthesis of Digital Systems.

Digital Systems is a core course taken by Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Computer Science students worldwide. In this class students learn the building blocks of digital systems and how to put them together to reach larger systems. For implementation purposes, students additionally learn a hardware description language such as VHDL to model their circuits, and then use FPGA chips, cutting-edge technology, to physically build and test their circuits described in VHDL. In this paper we address the challenges faced in teaching VHDL modeling and FPGA synthesis in such an introductory course, and then share our experience in teaching this part of the course. We explain the topics covered in class, we show our lecture slides as well as amount of lecture time to present them to students. Class performance has been encouraging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]