Abstract:

Logic Design is a fundamental subject in electrical engineering and electronics undergraduate programs. The paper describes the methodology chosen at the Faculty of Engineering in Foreign Languages from University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest to introduce the students to this subject and to create a pathway for later subjects that are more advanced. The discipline goes in the second year of study for students in the Applied Electronics and Information Engineering specialties and we changed the current method of giving it using for the laboratory works computer simulators like Multimedia Logic or Logisim. The subject hands-on focus extends now to Programmable Logic Devices (PLD), which are used to illustrate practically the subjects of Logic Design. This increase the attractiveness of the labs not just by the higher level of complexity and novelty, but also by the capability to design and create devices ready to work. From the large family of the PLD we chose the Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices because of their versatility and lower costs. For the hardware description, the students are introduced to the Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language (VHDL). There are given just the basic concepts of the language, sufficient to model, simulate and synthesize sequential and combinational logic. We present in this paper the succession of theoretical and practical constructs, devised for the students to learn logic design and gain familiarity with FPGA and VHDL as representatives or modern electronic design.

Keywords:

Logic Design, Programmable Logic Devices, FPGA, VHDL.