Incorporating FPGA-based labs within digital design course - A middle-eastern experience

Digital Design is a fundamental course within computer engineering curriculum at various universities around the world aimed at imparting basic information to the students about digital circuits' components and their logical behavior. Current trend is to incorporate Verilog programming and knowledge of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) into the contents of this course so that the students are introduced to these ideas at an early stage in their studies toward getting an engineering degree. In this paper, experiences of a veteran faculty member at a university in the Middle East are presented with reference to the impact on students' academic performance in the Digital Design Labs when these modern concepts are introduced at early stages of the computer engineering education. The depreciation in students' performance because of this academic experiment has provided enough evidence to delay introduction of hardware programming language and FPGAs by a few semesters within the engineering degree plan.