Honors Program
Honors in Technology
Date of Award
5-2016
Thesis Professor(s)
Hugh Blanton
Thesis Professor Department
Engineering Technology, Surveying, and Digital Media
Thesis Reader(s)
Hugh Blanton,Paul Simms, Cathy Whaley
Abstract
The engineering technology department at ETSU currently lacks a modern method to teach digital circuits. The aim of this thesis is to convert our current digital circuits labs to equivalent labs suited to run on the Basys 3. The Basys has several advantages over the aging NI Elvis boards (and now just breadboards) currently in use. The first advantage is that the Basys gives students a taste of FPGA programming without being overwhelmingly; like the systems currently in place for the digital signal processing class. The Basys is also a more modern system; our current integrated circuit and breadboard system is from the 70’s and has little to do with the modern world of electronics.
There are several major difficulties with moving towards the Basys 3. It requires several tweaks to the current computer security setting of the lab computers. The other issue to be solved is that very few people in the department have even an inkling of how to program in VHDL and most of them are outgoing students. This lack of skills could be a threat to the class but I have included an appendix and a few recommendations for books on the subject to ensure that system development can continue.
The other objective of this project was to see if there were ways to incorporate new educational techniques into the engineering technology curriculum. While there have been no actual tests on students, the groundwork has been laid to use some new ideas in the classroom. All of these new systems are designed to get students to think about how devices actually work and develop models to help them fully understand what is being taught.
Publisher
East Tennessee State University
Document Type
Honors Thesis - Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Taber, Caleb N., "Conversion of Digital Circuits Labs" (2016). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 395. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/395
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.
Included in
Educational Methods Commons, Electrical and Electronics Commons, Engineering Education Commons, Signal Processing Commons, VLSI and Circuits, Embedded and Hardware Systems Commons