Object oriented approach for modeling digital circuits

Undergraduate students in computer science at the University of Brest are learning basics of digital circuits by developing their own functional and structural models. The approach is object oriented to aggregate different abstraction levels in one single structure. This paper presents how a simple combinatorial and sequential circuit can be functionally modeled and how complex circuits can be hierarchically built. The students' project consists of designing a logic simulator using the Smalltalk environment, which allows them to integrate more easily recent research made in our lab on logic synthesis and on abstract low-level tools for FPGA using the same object oriented approach.