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