Abstract:

Our paper presents the work at our faculty for developing an online student laboratory for teaching digital design. The laboratory in not conceived to replace the traditional lab works but to allow student to access hardware and software tools available in the lab from a remote computer when they are not in use.
The continuous change of both hardware and software tools used in the system has raised several problems that had to be solved in order to maintain the online laboratory functionality.
The online laboratory is part of an e-learning system that was created to allow different educational activities both at undergraduate and graduate level. Several courses can profit from the hardware platforms integrated in the e-learning system: Digital Systems, Digital System Design, Microprocessor based systems, Microprocessors and Microsystems and Reconfigurable system design. With the development of FPGAs features that allow the development of embedded systems, other courses can benefit from the hardware platforms, good examples being the Computer Architecture and Real Time Programming courses.
The online laboratory is organized around the equipment used for normal student laboratory and includes personal computers connected to the Internet, programmable logic and microcontroller based prototyping boards. Using a computer connected to the Internet, students can access a set of FPGA based development boards in order to test their design. They can load the FPGA configuration file and can send test vectors to the board. Signals from the design outputs are read by microcontroller based boards and sent to the web interface or saved to a fine on a computer to be analyzed at a later time.
Technology evolution affects both component types of the online laboratory. In hardware new programmable devices are introduced, prototyping board change architecture and gain increased connectivity and there are available new external devices and peripherals. Software tools switch to highly integrated embedded systems, new releases are bringing increased design productivity, they come up with additional tools and cover sometimes both hardware and software design.
The paper will address some of these problems that affected our online laboratory and the solutions we found in order to delay the replacement of old hardware and software used in laboratory.

Keywords:

Online laboratory, FPGA boards, teaching digital design.