Teaching Agile Hardware Design with Chisel

Agile hardware design techniques take the best of software engineering methods and apply them to improve hardware design productivity. Agile approaches not only reduce the time to solution, but they can also produce solutions which are better tailored to their target problems. Chisel provides the perfect vehicle to teach these techniques as it allows for the creation of reusable hardware generators. In this work, we outline our experiences creating an agile hardware design course using Chisel, and the lessons learned from teaching it four times. All of the course materials are available as open source.