Digital Hardware Design Teaching

Abstract

This article presents the design and implementation of a complete review of undergraduate digital hardware design teaching in the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. Four guiding principles have been used in this exercise: learning-outcome driven teaching, deep learning, affordability, and flexibility. This has identified discrete electronics as key components in the early stages of the curriculum and FPGAs as an economical platform for the teaching of various digital hardware design concepts and techniques in later stages of the curriculum. In particular, the article presents the detailed design and implementation of one digital hardware design laboratory, called Gateway, which introduces students to synchronous digital circuit development from high level functional specifications, uses Verilog for hardware description and FPGAs as an implementation platform. Biggs’ theory of constructive alignment was applied in the design of this lab’s learning outcomes, lab content, teaching and learning methods, and assessment methods. The lab makes extensive use of multimedia in both lab content delivery and demonstration applications developed by students. Student feedback following the deployment of this lab was overwhelmingly positive and an evaluation of the lab results compared to previous lab offerings’ shows the merit of the approach taken.