Ten years of accessibility, collaboration, and hands-on learning have transformed how engineers explore and develop digital design skills.
We’re very proud to announce that EDA Playground has reached a remarkable milestone: 1 million registered users. That over a million people have chosen to register is a powerful indication of the role the platform has played in supporting the education and development of FPGA and IC engineers around the world.
This achievement reflects a decade-long commitment to making high-quality learning experiences widely available, fostering a global community of learners and practitioners, and demonstrating that practical, hands-on experimentation remains at the heart of effective engineering education.
"EDA Playground is great for learning Hardware Description Languages such as SystemVerilog and VHDL. That over a million people have chosen to register shows that it must have played a significant role in educating the world's FPGA and IC engineers." - Matthew Taylor | Senior Member of Technical Staff, Doulos.
From 13,000 to 1 Million: A Journey of Growth and Impact
When Doulos acquired EDA Playground in 2015, the platform had already established itself as a valuable community resource, with around 13,000 registered users. We recognised its potential not just as a convenient tool, but as a genuinely enabling environment for learning and sharing digital design knowledge.
Over the past decade, we’ve remained committed to preserving that spirit while steadily expanding the platform’s capabilities, scalability, and reach.
The growth from 13,000 to over 1 million users tells a clear story: engineers, students, educators, and hobbyists across the globe value a place where they can explore languages such as SystemVerilog, VHDL, Verilog, and UVM in a practical, hands-on way. EDA Playground has become a trusted environment for experimentation, learning, and communication, helping users build confidence and understanding that carries through into real-world engineering work.
A Test Bench for Real-World Learning
EDA Playground hasn’t just been a platform we support, it has become integral to how we deliver training.
Over the years, it has served as the test bench for hundreds of Doulos courses and webinars, allowing participants to move seamlessly from theory to practice. When learning advanced verification methodologies or working through challenging HDL concepts, there is no substitute for being able to experiment with real code and see results quickly.
By reducing friction between “I want to try this” and actually running an example, EDA Playground enables learners to focus on understanding concepts rather than wrestling with setup details. This immediacy is especially valuable in a learning context, where momentum and curiosity matter.
This close coupling between training and platform use has created a virtuous cycle: our training experience informs platform enhancements, and platform improvements enable better learning outcomes. Instructors and course participants alike have effectively road-tested the platform in real educational scenarios, helping ensure it meets the practical needs of working engineers.
Why Accessibility Matters in Learning
Engineering education thrives when experimentation is encouraged and barriers are minimised. EDA Playground demonstrates that it’s possible to support meaningful, hands-on learning experiences in a way that complements the broader EDA ecosystem.
Students use the platform to prototype ideas and reinforce academic concepts. Professionals use it to explore language features, illustrate techniques, or share minimal, reproducible examples when discussing design or verification challenges. Educators use it to support teaching, demonstrations, and guided exercises.
By supporting multiple simulators and workflows, enabling easy code sharing, and providing rapid feedback, EDA Playground has become a widely adopted educational resource across universities, training providers, and professional development programmes worldwide.
Looking Forward
Reaching one million users is a milestone worth celebrating, but it’s also a reminder of the responsibility that comes with supporting such a large and diverse community.
As we look to the next decade, our focus remains on:
- Preserving accessibility as a cornerstone of the platform
- Expanding and evolving tool support in line with industry needs
- Enhancing collaboration features that encourage shared learning
- Continuing to integrate EDA Playground into our training programmes to deliver hands-on learning at scale
The engineers using EDA Playground today are designing the systems that will underpin tomorrow’s technologies. By continuing to invest in this platform, we’re investing in the future of digital design education itself.
Join the Community
Whether you’re new to digital design or an experienced verification engineer, EDA Playground offers a space to learn, experiment, and share ideas. Join the million-strong community of engineers who use the platform to explore, explain, and refine their understanding of modern design and verification techniques.
Looking to deepen your expertise with expert-led instruction and structured hands-on labs? Explore Doulos’ comprehensive training courses covering SystemVerilog, UVM, VHDL, and more, many of which make direct use of the same platform that has empowered over a million engineers to learn by doing.
We’re grateful to the EDA vendors who license key elements of their industry-standard tools to underpin EDA Playground, making this learning environment possible. EDA Playground is designed as an educational and exploratory platform for experimentation, demonstration, and knowledge sharing; it is not intended for full-scale project development or production workflows. Importantly, it remains free to use, ensuring broad access for students, educators, and engineers worldwide who want to learn and experiment with digital design.
About Doulos: For over 30 years, Doulos has been a global leader in design and verification training, helping thousands of engineers master the languages, methodologies, and tools that drive innovation in digital design. Through our courses, consulting services, and platforms like EDA Playground, we remain committed to making advanced engineering knowledge accessible, practical, and relevant.
