Harnessing FPGAs for Computer Architecture Education
MSE '03 Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Microelectronics Systems Education
Computer Organization and Design, Fourth Edition, Fourth Edition: The Hardware/Software Interface (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design)
Targeting FPGA-based processors for an implementation-driven compiler construction course
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Southeast Regional Conference
Using FPGAs as a reconfigurable teaching tool throughout CS systems curriculum
Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
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Rising Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) market volumes combined with increasing industrial popularity have driven prices down and improved capability to the point that FPGA hardware and development environments afford academia the unique opportunity to embrace this technology not only in specialized graduate-level courses, but also across many of the courses of a traditional undergraduate computer science curriculum. We have begun adapting several of our undergraduate computer science courses and associated laboratories to make use of FPGAs as a common platform of instruction. In this paper, we illustrate how to make use of FPGAs in courses that cover digital logic design and assembly programming while discussing some of the pro's and con's of their use. We also provide a detailed discussion of a laboratory project that integrates both assembly programming as well as digital logic design in such a way that allows the student to perform a trade-off analysis between using software in the place of a purely hardware-based solution to a common interfacing problem. We conclude with an analysis of preliminary data gathered via student surveys and find that the results support the use of FPGA-based platforms in the undergraduate classroom. By making use of FPGA-based systems, not only are students exposed to a technology that is becoming much more prevalent in industry, they also benefit from the dovetailing of concepts and shorter learning curves between courses that come from making use of a common target platform.