I’m taking a lot of great Electrical Engineering classes this semester. My favorite lecturer this semester is Professor Choma from my EE348 Electronic Circuits class. His insistence on understanding concepts and not equations is just my style. But my favorite lab this semester is definitely EE201 Introduction to Digital Circuits.
The labs may take a long time, but they definitely worth it. The coolest part is that each partner group gets an FPGA board (check out the cover photo at the top). FPGA stands for Field Programmable Gate Array, but it’s basically like a customizable integrated chip. It’s a board that implements your hardware without you having to actually build circuits. The labs are fairly in-depth and we get to build real products. Two weeks ago we created and implemented a detour signal. Last week we did an introduction to Verilog (the hardware description language we learn in the class). We coded up a 60 Hz clock and a bunch of different kinds of registers (the blocks that hold memory).
At the end of the semester, each group makes a game as the final project. What’s cool is that the game is not going to be built on software; it’s going to be made directly in the hardware. The class teaches you how to design the circuitry and also gives you cool resources like the FPGA board so that you see your work in action!
