On Nov 24, 10:01 pm, jdw <jwal...@nait.ca> wrote:
> I hope I am not being presumptuous in seeking assistance from this
> group. I have been trying to research material with respect to a
> digital course I am teaching at a technical college in Edmonton,
> Alberta Canada (NAIT). The course is introductory in nature and is
> presently covering the usual digital topics including PLD programming
> quite well, however we are still back in the CUPL/palce22v10 era,
> which of course is embarrassing. I am toying with introducing Matlab
> (we could use it later in other courses) since it now appears to
> provide a means of creating VHDL code. Having read intensively for a
> couple of weeks I now see VHDL as a workable language, but probably
> excessively demanding of the students I am dealing with. Of course
> there is also the issue of the hardware that would be used in this lab/
> lecture course. To this moment I have been in contact with Aldec and
> am considering a development kit from Xilinx.
>
> In Alberta we have many dinosaurs, but I would prefer not to be one of
> them. If you feel you could comment constructively and don't mind
> taking a few minutes, I would be most appreciative. I am not that
> far from retirement age, have an EE degree, and am just trying to do
> my bit to improve the quality of what we are offering our students.
> It is very challenging jumping into something as complex as FPGA
> programming as you can no doubt understand.
>
> Jack

I used to TA the intro to digital design course at my univ. Altera's
DE2 boards are excellent educational/evaluation FPGA boards that we
used for the course. They are good for beginners but can be used for
some advanced applications too. I found Altera's boards more user
friendly than similar from Xilinx. Having years of electronics
hardware and embedded processor experience, and couple of years of
teaching undergrad/grad students, I found that introductory ECE course
is useful for students to see how simple software concepts (simple
logic in VHDL) translates into hardware functionality where you
control different things on the FPGA evaluation board (LEDs, 7-segment
digits as outputs, debounced switches and pushbuttons as inputs, or
even some external hardware on the breadboard via evaluation board's
header IOs). Inputs and outputs defined in the top level entity of the
VHDL design need to be mapped to the desired resources on the board
(this is nicelly covered in the Altera's datasheets).
The simple examples in VHDL where you implement just several logic
gates are the most useful for understanding the basics of
combinational logic implementation. Second part would be example of
sequential logic implementation - using a process with a clock that
assigns signals (those signals are inferred as flip flops during the
synthesis). This can include a counter for example. The third part can
be a simple state machine.

Hopefully this helps,
Dan