Development of an FPGA module for digital laboratory-on-a-chip

Abstract

Recently Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) has attracted the attention of educators and it is being used extensively in engineering education. FPGA-based education and research requirc almost no mIming cost as it can be reconfigured very quickly for unlimited number of timcs. Duc to enOllllOUSadvantagcs and attractive featurcs of FPGA system, a lot of research is going on to hamess the power of FPGA and to usc in designing and developing electronic system in diJTerenttype of applications. In the present educational system in the universities, discrete components are wired each other to conduct the laboratory experiments integrated with the course "Digital Logic Design". Students have to spend a lot of time in setting up each and every experiment before starting their real work involved in the experiment. It is a big hassle for both the students and the Lecturers. Exploiting the advantages of the FPGA device, the design of an educational platfollll has been proposed in this project for Laboratory-on- a-chip (LoC) which provides an easier and hassle free means for the lecturers and students to perform all the experiments of the said course. Although different FPGA manufacturing companies such as Altera, Xilinx etc. have introduced FPGA kits in the market, they are very much generalized and are overequipped with many peripheral components other than FPGA chip. Hence the board size is large and costly. Moreover, the interest of the FPGA beginners is not served in vendor provided FPGA board. The proposed LoC is small in size with affordable cost. Verilog design of some innovative FPGA based digital design is also presented, so that beginners of the FPGA users are attracted and familiar with the system. The proposed design is also facilitated to plug in separate application modules, it helps the student, lecturers and researchers to develop prototype oftheir FPGA based applications in easy and fast way.