Case-Based Instruction of Digital Integrated Circuit Design Courses for Non-major Undergraduates

With the rapid growth of semiconductor industry, there are more and more non-major students hope to learn digital integration circuit (IC) design methodology to improve the performance of their systems. However, the digital IC design methodology becomes more and more abstract to be studied because it tends to hardware description language (HDL) base. It is difficult for undergraduates to study. In this paper, an initial study of using case-based instruction in digital IC design course is described. The proposed case-base course consists of example cases, ten labs, and two projects. Each case includes illustrations of physical architecture, HDL codes, truth tables, waveform, and comments. Students can understand the meaning of HDL by referring to physical architecture, truth table, and waveform with HDL codes. It helps students to understand HDL more realistically rather than abstractively especially for non-major undergraduates. To investigate the effect of case-based instruction for non-major undergraduates, a specific class was constructed by 56 % major and 44 % non-major undergraduates. In the end of the course, both major and non-major undergraduates verified all practical labs and projects successfully. The average scores of agreement are 4.56 by major students and 4.44 by non-major students with a 5-level agreement questionnaire. The results of questionnaire show that most of students liked case-based instruction and looked forward to study other case-based engineering courses in the future.