Advanced Digital Laboratory: an FPGA-Based Remote Laboratory for Teaching Digital Electronics

Abstract

The experimentation component of most Science and Engineering curricula in Nigeria is inadequate. In Obafemi Awolowo University for example, undergraduate students typically carry out around five assignments related to digital electronics, and there is no treatment whatsoever of Field Programmable Gate Arrays(FPGAs). In the research work being reported, an attempt has been made to develop a remote laboratory though which the number of digital electronics experiments students carry out can be increased. The remote laboratory, called the Advanced Digital Lab (ADLab), allows students to synthesis digital systems on an FPGA with a hardware description language. To achieve this, a development board with an Altera Cyclone II FPGA is connected to a computer implementing the server tier of the iLab batched architecture. The client through which the remote student interacts with the ADLab is implemented with Java, which allows for a reasonable amount of platform independence. This paper discusses the software and hardware aspects of the ADLab architecture and gives some insight into some design decisions. The paper also reports that the system is being tested at Obafemi Awolowo University and that student feedback so far indicates high student satisfaction with the remote laboratory.