Introducing the concept of design reuse into undergraduate digital design curriculum

Intellectual property (IP) reuse based system design is becoming an industry standard recently. However, current educational system is not effective in the training of engineers who design by reuse and design for reuse. In this paper, we report our experience at the University of Maryland at College Park (UMCP) in introducing the concept of design reuse into the introductory digital logic design course. We present a practical curriculum innovation plan, which does not increase the teaching load or sacrifices the current curriculum significantly, to implement this idea. Our teaching experience show that students learn the basics of design reuse and enjoy doing IP-based design.