This practical course provides a closer look on the digital circuit design workflow. Implementing a specified hardware with VHDL, the students are getting more familiar with development tools supporting the workflow. Getting an overview about the design of digital systems, the participants learn more about the single design stages (simulation, synthesis, testing) step by step.

The contents could be summarised:

• design of processing unit
• implementation of simple processing unit with a hardware description language (VHDL)
• simulation of the processing unit
• synthesis
• programming of the processing unit on an assembler level.

Workspaces:
Our laboratory contains 25 workspaces.

Software:
Using ModelSIM for the simulation of the hardware description, another tool fitting the targeted hardware called PlanAhead (developed by Xilinx) is available.

Hardware:

Basys3 board by Digilent featuring a Artix-7 FPGA