Emphasizing Graphical Modeling Formalisms within Digital Systems Design Course

This paper presents a course relying on the usage of state-based graphical modeling formalisms within digital systems design, having reconfigurable logic devices as implementation devices, namely FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays). The emphasis is put on the modeling of the control part of the system, where several modeling formalisms were used, ranging from state diagrams to Petri nets, and including hierarchical and concurrent state diagrams and statecharts. All students holds during the whole semester a didactic kit containing a medium-side FPGA, which allows extensive exercising of VHDL coding and implementation. This kit also supports exercising different implementation strategies and comparisons between applicability of the referred modeling formalisms having specific problems at hands