The past few years has seen a proliferation of novice programming tools. The availability of a large number of systems has made it difficult for many users to choose among them. Even for education researchers, comparing the relative quality of these tools, or judging their respective suitability for a given context, is hard in many instances. For…

This article proposes a VHDL language course that establishes a strong correlation between the language statements and their use in circuit synthesis. Two course modules are described: a basic module that contains the essential concepts of the language, sufficient for students to describe medium complexity circuits, followed by a second module…