Project Team
Students
Russel Blust
Electrical Engineering
Penn State Harrisburg
Faculty Mentors
Nashwa Elaraby
Penn State Harrisburg
School of Science, Engineering, and Technology
Mohamed Almekkawy
Penn State University Park
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Project
https://sites.psu.edu/mcreu/files/formidable/2/rpb_mcreu_poster.pdf
Project Video
Project Abstract
Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) development boards are widely used programmable logic devices. Many of these boards integrate a central processing unit (CPU) alongside programmable logic in a system-on-a-chip (SoC) package. Such SoCs allow design optimizations by assigning parallel simple computations to the FPGA fabric and complex sequential calculations to CPUs. Hence faster speeds, parallel processing, and higher complexity are obtained. To prepare students for industry, many universities offer courses which teach students how to use the CPU and FPGA fabric in tandem on such devices. However, such courses are generally provided at a graduate level, and relevant vendor documentation is dense and opaque, making the topic difficult for undergraduate students to understand. This research represents an attempt to digest currently published course material and documentation to synthesize a set of guidelines and/or lab experiments to use as a basis for undergraduate instruction.
Specifically, this research was conducted by an undergraduate student attempting to perform openly published experiments to obtain a level-appropriate understanding of communication between the FPGA and CPU on Terasic’s DE1-SoC development board to serve as a basis for developing the desired guidelines and/or original experiments. Ultimately, these efforts did yield the basic understanding required to begin developing the guidelines and/or lab experiments originally envisaged. However, several roadblocks were encountered related to the required software packages and relevant literature which delayed progress. Hence, more time is required to apply the knowledge obtained during the research process to produce a complete set of guidelines and/or lab experiments which could be used as a basis for undergraduate introduction to the topic.
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