Enhancing VHDL learning through a light-weight integrated environment for development and automated checking

The development environments for Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) are essentially meant and designed for highly trained professionals/ engineers and as such are not suitable for use as an introductory tool for students learning HDLs. With students adopting a variety of operating systems, there is a need for a light-weight and cross-platform environment. Further, such a development environment for students should be able to provide some feedback about the functional correctness of their program. In this paper, we describe an open-source environment for developing and simulating VHDL programs on the client side, and a server side application for automated checking of submissions. The client has been developed for three desktop operating systems - Windows, Linux and MacOSX. The server application runs on Linux. The client allows students to develop and simulate VHDL programs. They can also submit programs to a remote server for automated verification. The environment - client and server, has been used for two semesters at the National University of Singapore to provide an enhanced learning experience to the students in a first year course on digital fundamentals.