FPGA Specification of a Personal Digital Assistant

Tools and techniques for high-level design of digital systems have been recently incorporated into some courses of Electronics and Mechatronics Engineering programs at ITESM. This paper reports the design, implementation and verification of a personal digital assistant (PDA) as a final project of the VLSI Design course at ITESM Campus Puebla. The PDA has been specified as being composed of five modules: notepad, clock/calendar, translator, hangman game and calculator. The design approach that has been used consists in using VHDL as the hardware description language and FPGA demonstration boards for physical prototyping. Details of the specification, implementation and verification of each component of the PDA are reported.