Industrial strength design automation tools in an introductory computer engineering laboratory

This paper describes our experience with using Mentor Graphics electronic design automation software and Xilinx field programmable gate arrays at the introductory level. The Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Missouri-Rolla has been a member of Mentor's Higher Education Program for almost ten years. We have been successfully introducing students to the tools by using a series of tutorial exercises in classroom, laboratory, and workshop settings. Until recently however our experience has been mainly with either upper level students including graduate students or with one or two sections of selected classes. Our use of field programmable gate arrays has been limited to upper level design courses. Beginning with the winter 1997 semester we decided to expand our offering and use both industrial strength design automation tools and field programmable gate arrays in all sections of a required introductory computer engineering laboratory.