Technology Education And The New Frontier Of Digital Electronics

Throughout the ages, man has learned, discovered and built using the resources available at the time. Education is about providing the knowledge and skill set necessary for the next generation to continue and advance this process. Engineering technology education must introduce the student to the latest methods that are being used in industry. Yet basic underlying principles of any subject are also important, especially if they are necessary to support current and future practices. As we make technological progress, many subjects that were at one time foundational to the practices of the day may become less important to present and future employers. Just as transistors replaced vacuum tubes, and calculators supplanted slide rules, another example of this phenomenon is occurring in the field of digital electronics today. Hardware description languages and large digital ICs are replacing discrete logic gates. This paper proposes a process, using digital electronics as an example, which keeps a curriculum and its graduates current by prioritizing the skills which are most important to current employers. An attempt is made to sort out the vital digital electronics topics from the less relevant, and to propose the necessary topics for today’s students. Introduction Digital electronics is an area in which rapid changes are occurring. Moore’s law has caused the discrete-gate logic of the 70s and 80s to be superseded by multimillion-gate CPLDs, FPGAs, and ASICs today [1]. Design methodologies for these large chips began with schematic entry design techniques in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Schematic entry of digital circuits was largely supplanted by the use of high-level hardware description languages in the mid-1990s, especially VHDL and Verilog. In the past, electronic systems had to compete in the market on the basis of cost, quality, and durability. In the modern arena we know that the system that is dominant today will be slower and cost more than the system that will be here tomorrow. Customers are not as likely to own a device for as long, due to the tendency to upgrade. Today, many large CPLDs and FPGAs are designed using a system-on-chip methodology[2] [3], in which large, predesigned VHDL or Verilog blocks are acquired, and then “stitched” together and verified. P ge 11241.2