Development of an FPGA Lab Curriculum for Beginning Digital Electronics Students

摘要

This paper is about the introduction of an FPGA based laboratory curriculum for beginning digital electronics students in the lab course ELE250U at Northern Illinois University (NIU). By replacing breadboards and ICs with FPGA development hardware and software tools, existing labs became more efficient signifying that more complex and progressive designs were possible as well as opening the door to HDL methodologies which were previously not supportable. The students readily adapted and seemed to prefer the programmable logic approach.