Xilinx ISE software teaching aid for Diploma's students

Abstract

VHDL is widely used in programming PLDs such as CPLD, FPGA and etc. Introducing VHDL to Diploma students is an advantage. Since VHDL is a hardware description language, teaching and learning process must be intuitive enough to help the students to gain better understanding. Xilinx ISE software is one of the synthesizers available and used in the industry. However, in introducing the software to these students there are constraints faced by the instructors in Faculty of Electrical Engineering UiTM Pulau Pinang. The constraints are space, time and software facility. An interactive and animated teaching aid has been developed to cater to the constraints. This paper is to present the developed teaching aid to optimize learning and teaching process in designing simple application of digital system using VHDL (text entry) on PLDs platform.