An Interactive Virtual Experiment Platform for Digital Logic Education

Design and implementation of basic combinational and sequential circuits are crucial to undergraduate digital logic education. Traditional experiment toolboxes or circuit boards are prone to hardware flaws, making experiments hard to succeed for inexperienced students. In this paper, we analyze the difficulty and demands on virtual experiment platforms, and propose a three-layer platform architecture for conducting virtual experiments, including an experiment layer, an interaction layer, and a simulation layer. Such platform is further implemented based on ligisim-evolution, enabling students to design combinational, sequential, and FSM circuits. The key features of interactive design, signal flow visualization, and stepwise simulation have met our demands and achieved our design objectives.