An industrial-strength design flow in just fifteen easy weeks!

Educators continue to face pressure from students and industry to employ the newest technology in the classroom. With regard to VLSI design and the role of CAD tools, a balance must be struck between fundamentals and training to a particular software package. This paper describes a semester project, suitable for an undergraduate VLSI course, which emphasized the design process, rather than individual tools. This process and the experiences associated with producing a pipelined, two's complement binary multiplier are presented.