An educational environment for VHDL hardware description language using the WWW and specific workbench

In this paper, an educational environment for the hardware description language (VHDL) is described. There are three parts that make up this environment: to teach students the fundamental concepts in theory, to design and simulate digital circuits and finally, to check the behavior of the real programmable logic devices (PLD). The theoretical tutorial and the practical manual for the simulations, both evolved using hypertext mark-up language (HTML), allow students to follow the course from any point of the planet through the World Wide Web (WWW). In order to achieve the above mentioned goals, a board has been specifically designed. This device is connected to a shared personal computer. The data transmission and the control of the board has been developed based on a set of Virtual Instruments (VI) designed over LabView (Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench from National Instrument) which is a graphical programming, language that has been widely adopted throughout industry, academia, and research lab as a standard for data acquisition, and instrument control software