This paper describes a scalable and extendable Remote Field Programmable Gate Array Laboratory (RemoteFPGA) which can be used to enhance the learning of digital systems and FPGA applications. The web-based console provides an always-on, real-time, interactive control and visualisation interface to/from a bank of remote FPGAs. A Xilinx ISE project template enables integration of user HDL-based designs to execute on the RemoteFPGA. Host-FPGA communication is supported using a register-based interface. Users can create real-time, interactive and visual demonstrators of digital systems components. The paper presents a demonstrator for a Finite State Machine (FSM) application, and illustrates the use of web-based control and visualisation for enhanced learning of FSM behaviour. The paper also presents a case study of the use of RemoteFPGA in undergraduate teaching.

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In this paper the design and rapid prototyping of networked A/V CE appliances is described. Practical implementations of three types of appliance are described: (i) a streaming A/V server; (ii) a streaming A/V client device and (iii) a networked A/V transcoding device. It is shown how these devices can be used to provide both a robust and scalable multimedia solution, which can be adapted for use in many applications. A review of known techniques for realizing the required multimedia functionality is given and some methods of reducing the development time of these prototypes are also discussed'. Note that many practical A/V appliances will combine aspects of all of the above "building block" devices. During the design process, however, it is very useful to be able to focus on several simpler devices and subsequently illustrate how they may be combined into more complex devices.[ that high-speed wireless networking provides has opened up many possibilities which were, until now, completely impractical. However, it should be noted that wireless networks are more susceptible to packet loss and other inconsistent behavioural aspects, this must be considered in the design of streaming A/V devices.To put these developments into context, a DVD quality multimedia stream encoded with MPEG-2 would be in the order of 8Mbps but an 802.1 lb network could only provide a practical throughput of around 5-6Mbps. Now, a stream of similar quality encoded using MPEG-4 uses approx. 2-3Mbps and an 802.1 Ig network can give throughput of 20Mbps. This allows for a number of streams on a network, and with the use of 108Mbps 802.11a/g "turbo" or the forthcoming 802.11n standard, the number of streams that a network can handle will rapidly increase.Users can be slow to adopt these devices as there can be a fear of the perceived complexity of using networked devices, and many have had negative experiences of trying to configure devices to interact reliably. Many consumers still use devices in a standalone configuration, even though they can act as network devices. It was decided early on that one of the main design goals would be to make these devices as reliable as possible, and as user friendly as possible.[3]DEVICE DESIGN The server device prototypes were run on standard desktop PCs. It was felt that in many cases a home PC is the place where most of the media content will be stored, and so this would be a suitable platformi. For the clients, low power VIA Mini-ITX motherboards were used, these include hardware MPEG-2 acceleration, which is used by the clients whenever an MPEG-2 stream is received, otherwise the stream is decoded in software.Early on in the development of these devices, it became clear that there was a need for a very flexible programming platform in order to achieve the type of rapid prototyping desired. However some sections of the devices, in particular the media codecs, would need to be implemented at quite a low-level in order to use the available resources efficiently. It was decided that the most suitabl...