These laboratory exercises begin with fundamental concepts and perform simple operations on the DE-series boards, like using switches and controlling LEDs and seven-segment displays. These exercises assume that students are just beginning to learn about digital logic concepts. Subsequent exercises progress to more advanced topics such as arithmetic circuits, flip-flops, counters, state machines, memories, data paths, and simple processors. Instructors of courses may choose to adopt the entire sequence of exercises, only selected exercises, or just parts of some exercises. We have tried to make the material as modular as possible so that instructors can combine these exercises with their own teaching materials.
Each exercise consists of multiple parts. In most cases the solution required for the early parts can be reused in a modular fashion in later parts. Also, the solutions produced for early exercises are often reusable for parts of more advanced exercises. Our basic approach is to encourage students to develop their circuits in small increments and to build larger circuits in a modular, hierarchical fashion.