EDA Tutorial

Abstract

This tutorial will demonstrate in an easily understood example what is known as top down design. The example selected, a ‘rolling dice’, was taken from student education in the university of the author. It has been used for many years in the VHDL basics course [26.3] and for first prototype runs in new CMOS technologies and for this reason it exists in several different implementations. It may be traced back to a first implementation [26.1], awarded as the second best student design on the international EUROPRACTICE conference in 1994 in Dresden [26.6]. It contains several different techniques for realizing a Finite State Machine, tightly coupled and locking with each other, and is far from trivial. The design with about 230 gates may be regarded as small today, but a complete reprint of the schematics generated from the code or the VHDL code itself is not possible in the context of this book, see [26.4] for more details. The design is demonstrated here in all its steps until it reaches the stage of being a product which is used by the author, e.g., as advertising tag for the university, as a visiting card, or similar purposes.