FPGA Remote Laboratory Using IoT Approaches

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are high-end devices that are not easily shared between multiple users. In this work, a remotely accessible FPGA framework using accessible Internet of Things (IoT) approaches was developed. This was created to provide a method for students to receive the same level of educational quality in a remote environment that they would receive in a typical, in-person course structure for a university-level digital design course. Keeping cost in mind, the functionality of an entry-level FPGA and a Raspberry Pi Zero was combined to provide IoT access for laboratory work. Previous works in this field allow only one user to access an FPGA at a time, which requires students to schedule time slots. This design is unique in that it gives multiple users the ability to simultaneously interact with one individual top-level design on an FPGA. This novel design has the benefit for classroom presentations, collaboration and debugging, and eliminates the need for restricting student access to a time slot for FPGA access. Further, the hardware wrapper is lightweight, utilizing less than 1% of tested FPGA chips, allowing it to be integrated with resource-heavy designs. The application is meant to scale with large user bases; there is no difference between how many users can interact with the remote design, regardless of the complexity of the design. Further, the number of users who can interact with a single project is limited only by the bandwidth restrictions imposed by Google Firebase, which is far beyond any practical number of users for simultaneous access.