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RTL Design Exercises for Hardware Interviews

A useful RTL practice sequence starts with small combinational blocks, then adds registers, state, arbitration and storage. Each step should be simple enough to reason about completely.

Suggested progression

  1. Multiplexer — combinational selection
  2. Counter — clocked state and reset
  3. Shift register — data movement
  4. Edge detector — previous-state reasoning
  5. Arbiter — priority and fairness
  6. FIFO — pointers, full/empty conditions and storage
  7. Register file — multi-port read/write behavior

How to use the exercises

For each design, define the interface first, write down state and corner cases, implement the RTL, then verify reset, boundary and simultaneous-event behavior. After the code passes, explain the synthesized hardware in words.