WHAT ARE THE “FUNDAMENTALS” OF MODERN DIGITAL LOGIC DESIGN? THE EVOLVING CONTENT OF TRINITY’S ONE-SEMESTER COURSE IN DIGITAL LOGIC DESIGN

As the practice of digital logic migrates away from discrete design and toward the construction of Systems on a Chip and the use of Intellectual Property Cores with programmable or highly customizable logic, how should the study of Digital Logic Design (DLD) evolve? Which of the “fundamentals” are still crucial to the understanding of DLD, and which are outmoded artifacts of the way we used to do things? What do we give up as we move from discrete design of digital logic to a architectural approach to digital systems? This paper describes the evolution of an elective course in DLD in an Engineering Science program. The course is currently split roughly into thirds: combinatorial design, sequential design, and computer architecture. Except for the very first lab experiment, which focuses on instrumentation, all experiments are currently done in the Integrated Design Environment (IDE) provided by the vendor of the Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) that comprise the main programmable hardware used for the course. Design entry using graphical components is done in the beginning of the course, with the majority of the projects utilizing VHDL (Very High Speed Hardware Hardware Description Language). Projects relate directly to the course material, and include a VGA (Video Graphics Array – video game, a 10-instruction simple computer, and a linefollowing robot. The course ends with case studies of contemporary digital designs. In this paper, the topics added and dropped are described, along with potential and actual repercussions on student learning.