New Custom Boards for Teaching Digital Design

Delivering high quality graduates is a constant concern in our University and Department. Motivating students is a permanent task and can prove difficult in some situations. A new line of practical experiments using dedicated boards was initiated in the Digital Integrated Circuits Laboratory with the goal of addressing the students’ interest in mind. These portable boards are meant to be borrowed to the students for their own experiments, can be tied together and are fully electrically protected. Microcontroller based excitation is also possible. The boards are fully configurable, all states are indicated with properly colored LEDs and protected against any wrong connection. Possible experiments range from functions implementation, including MSI circuits like decoders, multiplexers, adders to more elaborate trigger Schmitt applications. Most of experiments require only connection wires. The goal of this paper is to introduce the concept and the implementation of the first board of the new custom boards line.