Digital Electronics Learning System Based on FPGA Applications

Abstract

FPGAs ("Field Programmable Gate Arrays") constitute the base of many complex electronic systems with different applications ranging from the automotive sector to the multimedia market. Due to integrated circuits fabrication progress, current FPGAs includes very complex embedded digital blocks as serial transceivers or memory blocks. Therefore FPGA fundamentals and characteristics are not easy to explain considering that there are also a lot of devices and families from different manufacturers. By this reason, FPGA learning is usually based on describing a family and doesn't give a general view of the wide range of commercial devices. Due to that it is essential for the electronic learning community to dispose of tools facilitating the learning process of the FPGA fundamentals and the design of systems based on them. The learning system combines a tutorial with hardware and software tools to achieve a friendly interface with a computer intended to facilitate FPGA distance learning for students with a basic knowledge of digital electronics and VHDL.

Reconfigurable Platform to implement Electronic Instrumentation

“…The majority of theses available systems have a limited capability to conditioning of analog signals, in the most of the cases they only have ADC or DAC circuits without any circuit to adapt the signal [2]. Nevertheless, there are some examples of reconfigurable instrumentation system using FPGAs, but only for a specific application [6] [7]. In general, to consider these systems like a real instruments they must be have especial input and output properties, as for instance, normalized input impedance, a wide voltage range, good resolution, good bandwidth, etc.…”

Remote laboratory for testing processor cores in FPGA device

“…Programmable devices are used in digital electronics education process and several remote laboratories were developed for supporting distance learning [7][8][9][10]. Programmable development boards are connected to a computer used for design implementation, board configuration and hardware testing.…”

Improving Digital Electronics Education with FPGA technology, PBL and Micro Learning methods

“…Andreas Koch, Ulrich Golze from Technical University Braunschweig, Germany [1], Li Y, Chu W, from University of Aizu, Japan [2] and Michael A. Soderstrand from University of California, USA [3] are some of them. While increasing the similar studies at the following years [4][5][6][7], some researchers began to combined FPGA technology with PBL (Project Based learning) at engineering education studies [8][9][10][11][12]. In this study, a project named FPGA based Digital Electronics Education Project (FPGA_b_DEEP) is introduced and the last special example developed under the project is dealt with.…”