Teaching ASIC design with FPGAs

The University of Southern Colorado has developed a VLSI design program that has been used in several courses and design projects. ASICs employing field programmable gate array (FPGA) technologies are used for implementation of the resulting designs. Designs of a 4-b computer, a microcode CPU, and a floating point coprocessor are discussed. FPGA reprogrammability and fast turn-around times have proven ideal for the educational environment.<
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