Quick Start Guide to VHDL

The purpose of a hardware description languages is to describe digital circuitry using a text-based language. HDLs provide a means to describe large digital systems without the need for schematics, which can become impractical in very large designs. HDLs have evolved to support logic simulation at different levels of abstraction

Quick Start Guide to Verilog

The classical digital design approach (i.e., manual synthesis and minimization of logic) quickly becomes impractical as systems become more complex. This is the motivation for the modern digital design flow, which uses hardware description languages (HDL) and computer-aided synthesis/minimization to create the final circuitry. The purpose of this book is to provide a quick start guide to the Verilog language, which is one of the two most common languages used to describe logic in the modern digital design flow. This book is intended for anyone that has already learned the classical digital design approach and is ready to begin learning HDL-based design. This book is also suitable for practicing engineers that already know Verilog and need quick reference for syntax and examples of common circuits. This book assumes that the reader already understands digital logic (i.e., binary numbers, combinational and sequential logic design, finite state machines, memory, and binary arithmetic basics). Since this book is designed to accommodate a designer that is new to Verilog, the language is presented in a manner that builds foundational knowledge first before moving into more complex topics. As such, Chaps. 1–6 provide a comprehensive explanation of the basic functionality in Verilog to model combinational and sequential logic. Chapters 7–11 focus on examples of common digital systems such as finite state machines, memory, arithmetic, and computers. For a reader that is using the book as a reference guide, it may be more practical to pull examples from Chaps. 7–11 as they use the full functionality of the language as it is assumed the reader has gained an understanding of it in Chaps. 1–6. For a Verilog novice, understanding the history and fundamentals of the language will help form a comprehensive understanding of the language; thus it is recommended that the early chapters are covered in the sequence they are written

An educational tool to assist the design process of switched reluctance machines

The design of electric machines is a hot topic in the syllabuses of several undergraduate and graduate courses. With the development of hybrid and electrical vehicles, this subject is gaining more popularity, especially in electrical engineering courses. This paper presents a computeraided educational tool to guide engineering students in the design process of a switched reluctance machine (SRM). A step-by-step design procedure is detailed and a user guide interface (GUI) programmed in the Matlab® environment developed for this purpose is shown. This GUI has been proved a useful tool to help the students to validate the results obtained in their lecture assignments, while aiding to achieve a better understanding of the design process of electric machines. A validation of the educational tool is done by means of finite element method (FEM) simulations.Postprint (author's final draft

Introduction to Logic Circuits & Logic Design with VHDL

The overall goal of this book is to fill a void that has appeared in the instruction of digital circuits over the past decade due to the rapid abstraction of system design. Up until the mid-1980s, digital circuits were designed using classical techniques. Classical techniques relied heavily on manual design practices for the synthesis, minimization, and interfacing of digital systems. Corresponding to this design style, academic textbooks were developed that taught classical digital design techniques. Around 1990, large-scale digital systems began being designed using hardware description languages (HDL) and automated synthesis tools. Broad-scale adoption of this modern design approach spread through the industry during this decade. Around 2000, hardware description languages and the modern digital design approach began to be taught in universities, mainly at the senior and graduate level. There were a variety of reasons that the modern digital design approach did not penetrate the lower levels of academia during this time. First, the design and simulation tools were difficult to use and overwhelmed freshman and sophomore students. Second, the ability to implement the designs in a laboratory setting was infeasible. The modern design tools at the time were targeted at custom integrated circuits, which are cost- and time-prohibitive to implement in a university setting. Between 2000 and 2005, rapid advances in programmable logic and design tools allowed the modern digital design approach to be implemented in a university setting, even in lower-level courses. This allowed students to learn the modern design approach based on HDLs and prototype their designs in real hardware, mainly field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). This spurred an abundance of textbooks to be authored teaching hardware description languages and higher levels of design abstraction. This trend has continued until today. While abstraction is a critical tool for engineering design, the rapid movement toward teaching only the modern digital design techniques has left a void for freshman- and sophomore-level courses in digital circuitry. Legacy textbooks that teach the classical design approach are outdated and do not contain sufficient coverage of HDLs to prepare the students for follow-on classes. Newer textbooks that teach the modern digital design approach move immediately into high-level behavioral modeling with minimal or no coverage of the underlying hardware used to implement the systems. As a result, students are not being provided the resources to understand the fundamental hardware theory that lies beneath the modern abstraction such as interfacing, gate-level implementation, and technology optimization. Students moving too rapidly into high levels of abstraction have little understanding of what is going on when they click the “compile and synthesize” button of their design tool. This leads to graduates who can model a breadth of different systems in an HDL but have no depth into how the system is implemented in hardware. This becomes problematic when an issue arises in a real design and there is no foundational knowledge for the students to fall back on in order to debug the problem

Introduction to Logic Circuits & Logic Design with Verilog

The overall goal of this book is to fill a void that has appeared in the instruction of digital circuits over the past decade due to the rapid abstraction of system design. Up until the mid-1980s, digital circuits were designed using classical techniques. Classical techniques relied heavily on manual design practices for the synthesis, minimization, and interfacing of digital systems. Corresponding to this design style, academic textbooks were developed that taught classical digital design techniques. Around 1990, large-scale digital systems began being designed using hardware description languages (HDL) and automated synthesis tools. Broad-scale adoption of this modern design approach spread through the industry during this decade. Around 2000, hardware description languages and the modern digital design approach began to be taught in universities, mainly at the senior and graduate level. There were a variety of reasons that the modern digital design approach did not penetrate the lower levels of academia during this time. First, the design and simulation tools were difficult to use and overwhelmed freshman and sophomore students. Second, the ability to implement the designs in a laboratory setting was infeasible. The modern design tools at the time were targeted at custom integrated circuits, which are cost- and time-prohibitive to implement in a university setting. Between 2000 and 2005, rapid advances in programmable logic and design tools allowed the modern digital design approach to be implemented in a university setting, even in lower-level courses. This allowed students to learn the modern design approach based on HDLs and prototype their designs in real hardware, mainly fieldprogrammable gate arrays (FPGAs). This spurred an abundance of textbooks to be authored, teaching hardware description languages and higher levels of design abstraction. This trend has continued until today. While abstraction is a critical tool for engineering design, the rapid movement toward teaching only the modern digital design techniques has left a void for freshman- and sophomore-level courses in digital circuitry. Legacy textbooks that teach the classical design approach are outdated and do not contain sufficient coverage of HDLs to prepare the students for follow-on classes. Newer textbooks that teach the modern digital design approach move immediately into high-level behavioral modeling with minimal or no coverage of the underlying hardware used to implement the systems. As a result, students are not being provided the resources to understand the fundamental hardware theory that lies beneath the modern abstraction such as interfacing, gate-level implementation, and technology optimization. Students moving too rapidly into high levels of abstraction have little understanding of what is going on when they click the “compile and synthesize” button of their design tool. This leads to graduates who can model a breadth of different systems in an HDL but have no depth into how the system is implemented in hardware. This becomes problematic when an issue arises in a real design and there is no foundational knowledge for the students to fall back on in order to debug the problem

Microscopic Description of Super Heavy Nuclei

The results of extensive microscopic Relativistic Mean Field (RMF) calculations for the nuclei appearing in the alpha - decay chains of recently discovered superheavy elements with Z = 109 to 118 are presented and discussed. The calculated ground state properties like total binding energies, Q values, deformations, radii and densities closely agree with the corresponding experimental data, where available. The double folding (t-rho-rho) approximation is used to calculate the interaction potential between the daughter and the alpha, using RMF densities along with the density dependent nucleon - nucleon interaction (M3Y). This in turn, is employed within the WKB approximation to estimate the half lives without any additional parameter for alpha - decay. The half lives are highly sensitive to the Q values used and qualitatively agree with the corresponding experimental values. The use of experimental Q values in the WKB approximation improves the agreement with the experiment, indicating that the resulting interaction potential is reliable and can be used with confidence as the real part of the optical potential in other scattering and reaction processes.Comment: Accepted for publication in Annals of Physics (NY