Design and Testing of a Wireless Communication Enabled FPGA Development Board: A Comprehensive Education and Application Platform from IoT to Circuit Design

Abstract

Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit (IC) that can be reprogrammed or configured by the customer or designer after production for rapid prototyping and post-process development. In this study, a cost-effective FPGA development board is designed to create basic engineering education applications and implement them in real-time. The FPGA development board utilizes an Altera Cyclone IV E-series chip and includes Bluetooth and Wi-Fi modules to provide a wider range of applications. This integration simplifies the use of wireless communication in various projects and applications for researchers and engineers. To verify the accuracy of the proposed board, simulations of selected digital designs and Bluetooth applications were first performed in VHDL (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language) using Intel® Quartus® Prime Lite Edition software. Then, experiments were performed on the board following the pin assignment configurations. It was observed that the developed applications worked successfully on the FPGA development board. As a result, this board, equipped with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi modules, offers a fast and cost-effective solution for users in various fields such as mobile, robotics, smart home systems, and remote monitoring and control devices