Teaching Digital System Timing: A Comprehensive Approach

A graduate-level computer engineering course at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), Portland, takes a novel systematic and comprehensive approach to teaching digital system timing. The course organizes material from a variety of sources to cover a variety of practical aspects of timing analysis and design for single-clock, multiple-clock, and clockless digital systems. The course's goal is to prepare graduates to solve a gamut of real-world timing problems for complex system-on-chip designs targeted for custom integrated circuit (IC) or field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation. The course has been offered annually at OHSU since 2003 and is now a required part of the computer engineering curriculum. Course evaluation survey results show that students feel that the course was a valuable part of their curriculum and that the course made them feel more competent in the area of digital system timing. The course syllabus is online at http://www.csee.ogi.edu/class/ee572.