A bottom-up approach to digital design with FPGA

Deeds is a tool, specifically designed for educational applications, for design and simulation of digital systems based on combinational and sequential blocks, finite state machines and microcomputers. Deeds is characterized by an extremely simple user interface and it is associated with a large repository of application projects, available on the web. The paper presents a newly developed feature of Deeds, conceived for introducing FPGA-based systems in a first course of digital design based on Deeds. This extension allows students to compile a project into an FPGA chip directly from Deeds, leaving in the background the operations performed by the FPGA specific EDA tool. The main advantage is a smoother transition between Deeds and a professional design environment.