A case study in the development of multi-media educational material: the VHDL interactive tutorial

• Published in: IEEE transactions on education Vol. 40; no. 4; p. 17 pp.
• Main Authors: Gadient, A.J., Stinson, J.A., Taylor, T.C., Aylor, J.H., Klenke, R.H., Salinas, M.H., Madisetti, V.K., Egolf, T., Famorzadeh, S., Karns, L.N., Carter, H.W.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.11.1997
• Subjects: Costs; Digital systems; Educational programs; Educational technology; Fuzzy systems; Prototypes; Signal design; Signal processing; Technology transfer; Tutorial
• ISSN: 0018-9359; 1557-9638
• DOI: 10.1109/13.759676

While industry and academia have been aware of the need for an intensive study of embedded digital system design, resource constraints, fuzzy objectives, and short-time horizon have handicapped progress. The 150M Rapid Prototyping of Application Specific Signal Processors (RASSP) program is a major DARPA/Tri-Service effort designed to overcome these limitations. This effort has developed a number of new technologies that will lead to dramatically shorter prototyping times and reduced life cycle costs. In a effort to ensure the successful transfer of these new technologies, the RASSP Education and Facilitation (RASSP E&F) program is working to transfer this technology into graduate and undergraduate curricula by developing and transferring educational material. Only by successfully inserting these rapid-prototyping technologies into the curricula and research activities of the university community will the long term benefits of these technologies be realized. To achieve this technology transfer objective, the RASSP E&F program has developed educational material on the key elements of rapid-prototyping of embedded digital systems technology. The result of this effort is a set of educational "modules" covering selected topics. In conjunction with IEEE, several of the modules developed by the RASSP E&F program designed to teach students the VHDL language were converted to HTML and linked with the VHDL language reference manual to form a self-paced VHDL interactive tutorial. A demonstration version of this learning tool, currently published by IEEE, is presented.