A Virtual Board Approach for Prototyping and Teaching Digital Design

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach for prototyping digital circuits and teaching digital design. The approach uses a client-server architecture and aims to reduce the use of computing resources and software maintenance by the student. The reduction of computing resources and software maintenance occurs because the system emulates digital circuits on the server-side while the student interacts with the system through a graphical user interface containing a virtual printed circuit board on the client-side. Preliminary results of the proposed architecture have emulated designs of up to 8,000 two-input NAND gates at 1Hz system clock without loss of responsiveness.