An Educational Tool for Digital Electronic System Synthesis and Optimization

Abstract

Considering the complexity of today's digital electronic systems, it is crucial to have open-source electronic design automation (EDA) tools specifically developed for educational purposes. Such tools can easily be modified to meet the demands of the course being taught and they can be configured to expose the intermediate steps during the design process. This chapter presents an educational EDA tool to help students better understand and implement fundamental concepts in digital electronic design and synthesis courses. The tool receives an intermediate format that represents the target system behavior and a set of constraints as input, and generates the representation of the actual circuit using high-level electronic components such as functional units, memory, and steering logic components available in its technology library. It considers execution delay, area, memory space consumption, and reliability constraints. The user is able to interact with the tool during the design process and select the algorithms to perform various synthesis and optimization tasks.