ASIC Design at Home

A possibility to overcome the problem of organizing a diploma-thesis at a distance university with focus on practice in the design of Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) is presented with the aid of an example. A student of electrical engineering designed a fast arithmetical unit for use in a digital filter with a VHDL software package (ALLIANCE (see [laboratory 1994]) freely distributed on the internet. He did his work at home with a standard personal computer running a free Unix clone (Linux (see [Johnson 1993]) in summer 1993.