Digital system design options and trade-offs, Design methodology and technology overview, High Level System Architecture and Specification: Behavioral modeling and simulation, Hardware description languages, combinational and sequential design, state machine design, synthesis issues, test benches. Overview of FPGA architectures and technologies: FPGA Architectural options, granularity of function and wiring resources, coarse vs fine grained, vendor specific issues (emphasis on Xilinx and Altera), Logic block architecture: FPGA logic cells, timing models, power dissipation I/O block architecture: Input and Output cell characteristics, clock input, Timing, Power dissipation, Programmable interconnect - Partitioning and Placement, Routing resources, delays; Applications - Embedded system design using FPGAs, DSP using FPGAs, Dynamic architecture using FPGAs, reconfigurable systems, application case studies. Simulation / implementation exercises of combinational, sequential and DSP kernels on Xilinx / Altera boards.