Teaching FPGA system design via a remote laboratory facility

This short paper describes a remote laboratory facility for platform FPGA education. With the addition of an inexpensive piece of hardware, many commercial off-the-shelf FPGA development boards can be made suitable for use in a remote laboratory. The hardware and software required to implement a remote laboratory has been developed and a remote laboratory facility deployed at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Advantages, concerns, and actual costs are reported. The experience of using this facility in a senior/first-year graduate-level platform FPGA course is also described. Although these data are preliminary, survey results and first-hand experience with the laboratory were very encouraging and suggests that further studies on student learning are warranted.