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Altera_Forum
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8 years ago

University Looking to Update Old Hardware

I am the Electrical Engineering Lab supervisor at a University in Pennsylvania and we are looking to update our PLD collection, programming interface, software (well basically everything) related to ...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
8 years ago

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I must appologise for my post. It was late, I didnt read the message properly and I just fired something out.

I think you will struggle to find anything to fit your bill directly? By how about something like a rasberry pie? (https://www.raspberrypi.org/) With the 40 pin GPIO connector you could easily wire up the outputs to a breadboard, and may be a more familiar environment to some students already, but now you're introducing custom external hardware. Plus this keeps it all in line with embedded systems that are pervasive in industry. And it's cheap.

Going with the diligent (or similar) above may work, but you are going to be introducing tools that will be unfamiliar to the students (ISE, Vivado, Quartus) that will have a cost implication over time with licences. With the Pi, its all free and open source.

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Xilinx licensing for the low end devices is free just as it is for Altera, so little or no cost impact there. It would be good for university students to have exposure to Xilinx toolset flow (ISE, Vivado) as well as Altera (Quartus). University students should learn how to use Windows AND linux, not just one or another. That's what school is for.

Yeah I know this is an Altera based forum but the real world out there is more than just Altera and university students should be exposed to multiple vendors.

And as much as I like Raspberry PI (for embedded linux hacking) or Arduino (for embedded bare-metal hacking) these are basically software development platforms so they really serve a different purpose than, for example, the Digilent CPLD or FPGA based development boards do. Electrical engineers today do need exposure to embedded software concepts, so a lab with Arduino boards is probably a requirement as well (I think Raspberry PI is overkill, but that is my opinion). But an electrical engineer still needs to understand the concepts of circuits and gates and logic, how to use them, and when to use them. Not everything can be reduced to a software problem. At least not yet.