Budapest, Hungary Beyond Theory” All-in-one … · All-in-one development boards help create...

All-in-one development boards help create affordable home laboratories for students

Embedded processing support for Digilent FPGA development boards

Mircea Dăbâcan1, Clint Cole2, Albert Fazakas1, Mihaela Radu3

1. Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technology, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, Digilent RO, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

[email protected], [email protected],[email protected], [email protected]

2. Digilent Inc., 215 East Main, Suite D, Pullman, WA, U.S.A., [email protected]. Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology,

5500 Wabash Avenue, CM4105, Terre Haute, IN, U.S.A., [email protected]

““Beyond TheoryBeyond Theory””

European Workshop on Microelectronics Education

May 28-30, 2008, Budapest, Hungary

• Keyword in learning digital design: PRACTICE (design it, try it, test it, debug it)• Practicing = Hands-On.• In Lab.

• Limited time allocated for laboratory work• Busy schedules of both labs and students• Difficult access to development boards and lab equipment




Where?Drawbacks:




Then let students work at their home:Digilent development boards:• FPGA and microcontroller-based low-cost boards, cheaper than a textbook

• No hidden costs for working with the board: only a USB cable is needed to power up and configure the board, even transfer data

• Development software is free

• Various peripheral modules, reference components and reference designs available




Why Digilent?• Executives both in USA and Romania also involved in education (WSU, TUCN)

• Direct knowledge of educational needs• First-level feedback from the students

• Educational material freely available on the website www.digilentinc.com

• The development boards are covering more than one curricula:

• Beginner: O<=A AND B;• Intermediate: PS2, SPI, UART interfaces• Advanced: Embedded Microblaze designs




Affordable prices due to excellent cooperation with




Digilent Design Contest• At the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, 2008: the 4th Edition

• At the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, 2008: the 2nd Edition

• Students come up with their own design ideas

• 4 months for project development•Participants finalizing their project can keep the hardware they used

• In order to implement algorithms in FPGA devices:• The state machine approach is too inflexible for complex algorithms (FSM with 32 states and 48 transitions?)• Solutions offered by Xilinx:

• The 8-bit Picoblaze soft-core microcontroller-based designs• The 32-bit Microblaze soft-core or PowerPc hardware microprocessor systems• Embedded processor systems can be build using the Xilinx Embedded Development Kit (EDK)• However, EDK target boards from Xilinx are usually expensive




•A solution: Support the low-cost Digilent FPGA development boards for EDK• The FPGA devices found on the boards are large enough to allow implementing Microblaze processor systems• EDK board support package was created• Issues: the Nexys/Nexys2 onboard peripherals are not sufficiently supported by the EDK cores

• Custom memory controller for the Nexys onboard CDRAM and StrataFlash memories• Custom USB-EPP interface core under EDK




• Educational benefits of the cores created:• Affordable embedded processing solution for students and beginners in EDK:

• Use BSB (Base System Builder) to build a whole microprocessor system just with several clicks• Use Custom Peripheral Wizard to create glue-logic peripherals addressable from the microprocessor

• A starting point to create peripherals that take the advantages offered by the PLB4v3 processor local bus




Thank You for Your attention!




Budapest, Hungary Beyond Theory” All-in-one … · All-in-one development boards help create...

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