Hardware Design of Computer Arithmetic Blocks for Engineering Laboratory Practices

This work presents a set of laboratory practices that can be carried out by students of Digital Design courses required in engineering programs like Electronics, Communications, Mechatronics, etc. The purpose of these lab is that the students develop their skills and confidence in the design of arithmetic hardware blocks by presenting them specific problems. In this sense, this paper shows a design methodology to be performed in a laboratory for the design of arithmetic blocks which can be implemented in microcontrollers and FPGAs. More specifically, we present the block design of a number's multiplicative inverse (), its square root () and the square root of its inverse (). The completion of these exercises requires the application of the Newton-Raphson algorithm, polynomial approximations of functions, difference equations and digital design. Students of our institution completed the lab practices and after analyzing the results of student surveys and classroom observations, we found out that completing these tasks significantly contributed to the students' training in the hardware design field.