ipPROCESS: using a process to teach IP-core development

The reusing of intellectual property cores has been an alternative to the increasing gap between design productivity and chip complexity of emerging system-on-chip (SoC) designs. But the design of IP-cores has its own challenges like portability, reusability, standards interfaces, well-defined and useful documentation, easy integration and so on. All these characteristics together make the design of an IP-core a complex task and in this way teaching this discipline has became a new challenge for educators. In this paper we present an experience about how the utilization of a well-defined development process can be used to facilitate and speed-up student learning.