Introducing signal processing through an advanced digital design course

We describe our experience introducing DSP concepts via an FPGA-based advanced digital design course. The students had previously taken an introductory digital design course and a continuous-time linear systems course; a few were taking an introductory DSP course concurrently. Through a series of weekly lab exercises, the students learned advanced FPGA design methods while progressively constructing a SSB receiver for the 40-meter amateur radio band. The lab exercises introduced modulation, IQ signal representation, sampling, downconversion, frequency synthesis, CIC and FIR filters, and Hilbert transforms. The first offering of this course in Spring 2009 was successful and a repeat offering is planned for Spring 2011.