Teaching a Modern Digital Systems Design Course: How to Select the Appropriate Programmable Devices and Software?

Abstract

Faculty face many tradeoffs and choices when they are called upon to select the programmable logic and associated software that they will use in their digital courses and that is the primary focus of this paper. The integrated lecture/laboratory digital systems design course in the Department of Engineering Technology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock is no exception. Programmable logic was first introduced to this course in the late 1990’s, with the hardware consisting of simple Programmable Logic Devices (PLDs) and Complex PLDs (CPLDs). VHDL (Very high speed integrated circuit Hardware Description Language) was selected as the programming language. This worked well, with students programming their chips and incorporating them in circuits. The course was upgraded several years ago to use Altera chips and the Quartus II development platform, because the software from Cypress semiconductor, which was used previously, no longer had the desired level of support. Microcontrollers are typically not included in a digital systems design course, however for many digital applications microcontrollers provide a very cost effective solution in a compact package. This paper examines the tradeoffs and suitability of CPLDs, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), microcontrollers, and their associated software for digital applications typically taught in a digital design course in an engineering technology program.