FPGA Remote Laboratory: Experience in UPNA and UNIFESP

Abstract

FPGAs are a powerful technology for teaching hardware design, through which students can learn how to design hardware using common hardware description languages such as VHDL or Verilog. However, the use of FPGAs in the classroom has several different problems, such as availability or associated costs of acquiring and maintaining the FPGAs. Also, relying on FPGA boards in the classroom is typically problematic because students cannot use the boards for doing projects after classes or during weekends. To solve this problem, remote laboratories can help allow more flexibility to students. A remote laboratory is a hardware and software system that allows students to access a real FPGA located somewhere else on the Internet. In this article, a cross-national remote laboratory is presented. This remote laboratory has multiple copies (17 devices at the time of this writing) deployed both in UPNA (Spain) and UNIFESP (Brazil), and using LabsLand (Spain) for technology and management of the laboratory. Students of both institutions access these laboratories transparently. This provides automatic fault tolerance and increases the potential number of concurrent students using the laboratories by sharing the boards among both institutions.