Welcome to ENGR 219: Digital Design
Welcome to the Digital Design course for electrical engineering and computer science students. My name is Alan Ross and I will be your instructor for this course. This letter is to inform you of some important details prior to the start of the class. Please read this page carefully.
Class Requirements
As you already know, you need to have an e-mail account and access to the World Wide Web. This course teaches the basic design techniques for logic circuits and digital systems. The course emphasizes the synthesis of circuits and systems and explains how they are implemented using real chips and programmable logic devices. Fundamental concepts are illustrated using small examples which are easy to understand, then a modular approach is used to show how large circuits are designed.
VHDL is well integrated into the course to enable the student to quickly become involved in real designs. To make it easy for the student to obtain modern CAD tools, the textbook for the course includes a CD-ROM that contains a student version of one of the most popular and powerful CAD systems used in industry today. This software provides automatic mapping of designs written in VHDL into Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA's) and Complex Programmable Logic Devices (CPLD's). If students are not comfortable using and learning VHDL, this system also supports a very intuitive schematic entry design option that allows students to drag and drop circuit components from a library of devices and connect them to form a circuit diagram that can then be compiled into VHDL code.
Using this software package, the student will be able to:
Enter a design into the CAD system
Compile the design for a selected chip type
Simulate the functionality and timing of the resulting circuit
Required Text
Fundamentals of Digital Logic with VHDL Design, Brown and Vranesic, 3rd Edition, McGraw-Hill, 2009.
Computer Requirements
Web Browser: Microsoft Explorer 7.0 or Netscape Navigator 7.0 or above, or the latest version of Mozilla.
Computer Specs: PC or Power Macintosh with at least a 1 GHz processor, and 512 MB of RAM.
Operating System: Windows XP or MAC OS 9.0, or LINUX (Red Hat 8.0), or greater.
Mandatory Meetings
There are only two mandatory in-person class meetings. One for the midterm, and one for the final exam. Students will have the option of taking these exams at the San Luis Obispo, or the North County campuses. The course will be setup on the myCuesta website, where the student is encouraged to take the online tutorial explaining all of the features of the site and how to use them. Students who want to be introduced to the CAD system and course website by the instructor, should come to my office during office hours, or come to the Electronics Lab at the San Luis Obispo campus during lab hours.
Note! If students can not come to campus for the two proctored exams, then they can still take the course, but must arrange for a local community college instructor to proctor the exam. This is actually quite easy, please contact me via e-mail for details.
Introduction and Online Orientation
As mentioned above this course will be setup on the myCuesta website. Your initial username and password will be sent to you after you have registered for this course. You will then logon to the myCuesta website at: my.cuesta.edu and access the course homepage. The course homepage will contain communications tools that allow the student to view the course syllabus and schedule, download files, access instructor provided links to class resources, e-mail the instructor and retrieve your myCuesta email, and use course chat rooms, message boards, and calendars. Please email me at the following address if you have any further questions: aross@cuesta.edu.
Registration
Please return to the Cuesta College home page www.cuesta.edu in order to register for this course.
Sincerely,
Alan Ross
Engineering and Technology
Cuesta College
Office: Building 4300
Phone: (805) 546-3100 x2727
email: aross@cuesta.edu