© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019
The large and ever-growing complexity of today’s digital systems places heavy demands on educational systems that are in charge of training the new generations of designers or just providing a solid understanding of the digital world. Academic institutions struggle to keep the pace of technological advancements, and people, like the authors of this book, who are in charge of introductory- or intermediate-level education, have the responsibility to face the problem and make choices.
It is certainly obvious that a digital designer must be trained in the use of hardware description languages (hdls) and it is nowadays a common practice to introduce them very early in the courses, substituting the traditional approach based on components and schematics. The choice to describe digital systems by HDL matches very well with the adoption of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) for the practical implementation of projects, using prototype boards provided by chip producers