Teach Reconfigurable Computing using mixed-grained fabrics based hardware infrastructure

With the prevalence of reconfigurable computing, many relevant courses are designed and taught to graduate students. Traditional Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) based hardware platforms are far from satisfying to reflect the important criteria characterizing a general reconfigurable computing system. In order to provide students a comprehensive understanding of reconfigurable computing system in a broader way, this paper presents a mixed-grained educational hardware platform. Different from the traditional ones, the proposed hardware platform includes not only fine-grained reconfigurable fabrics (e.g. FPGAs), but also coarse-grained ones which makes it possible to reveal essential features and intrinsic mechanisms of reconfigurable computing system. Utilizing this hardware platform, a course including four hands-on laboratory projects is designed. The feedback from students and teachers confirms that with the help of the proposed hardware platform, a thorough understanding of reconfigurable computing systems is achieved in an intuitive way and the practical experience is also significantly enhanced.