Digital systems and signal processing: creating connections in the curriculum

Engineering students are often tinkerers. However, our students of today are more likely to have tinkered with software than hardware. This effect is readily seen in systems classes where students tend to visualize each concept as a programming algorithm. This viewpoint must be balanced by exposure to implementation using hardware techniques. This can be accomplished at the sophomore level by carefully selected examples in an introductory logic design course. Additional connections can be made in the first systems course. In this paper we outline an approach for connecting digital design to digital filtering. Concepts that could be beneficially exploited using this approach include latency, state, number representations, arithmetic hardware, and pipelining. Specific opportunities for making these connections in digital logic and systems classes are identified.