Course on Digital Electronics Oriented to Describing Systems in VHDL

A new orientation for a multidisciplinary industrial engineering program course on digital electronics is proposed. Students are trained to describe complete systems in very high speed integrated circuit hardware description language (VHDL). These systems have been previously modeled with Matlab/Simulink, including both continuous and discrete components. Digital controllers based on concurrent hardware are designed for these systems in the same framework. After developing and simulating the behavioral model of the system or plant, the controller is redescribed under the synthesis constraints and implemented in a field-programmable gate array evaluation board for verification, along with the system under control. In this way, the course is not only intended for digital electronics specialists but also for students with diverse engineering backgrounds.