A multimedia virtual lab for digital logic design

In teaching undergraduate courses in digital logic design, it has been traditional to have hardware laboratories using logic boards or programmable FPGA boards. In these settings, students physically wire sample designs from a problem set, and present the finished product for verification to a lab instructor, together with testing the chips themselves and acquiring the experience of hands-on hardware. Many digital logic design courses have switched to using only software simulators or VHDL-based exercises, often due to lack of resource allocations. We have designed and implemented a multimedia-based virtual lab, which allows the students to practice on their design, explore in a tutorial fashion various options, and gives them as close as possible a real hands-on experience, through the use of a "virtual board" and links to background tutorial material which can be customized.