Abstract:

The Coronavirus pandemics switched the perspective of doing practical works in the laboratory. The students from the Applied Electronics program of the Faculty of Engineering in Foreign Languages, University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest, have in the curricula for the first semester of the fourth year the discipline “Programmable Electronic Systems with FPGA”. The subject was thought to be completed in the laboratories of the faculty, but due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemics, it is performed online and we had to replace the practical experience with an efficient substitute. We will describe in this paper our experience in choosing the appropriate application/ environment, where important parameters are the usefulness, the cost-effectiveness, the ease of use, the support, the performance and the availability for different operating systems. We will give examples of Hardware Description Language learning using G Hardware Design Language (GHDL), which can be used as a analyzer, compiler, simulator and (experimental) synthesizer . For visualizing the waveforms we are using GTKWave. These open source and multiplatform applications can be used for both online and distance learning and they proved to be an effective solution to learn and to understand the subject, so they are highly appreciated by the students.

Keywords:

Digital Integrated Circuits, FPGA, Distance Learning, Online Learning.