A cost-effective way to expand the scope of FPGA based projects

Abstract

FPGA is widely used in Computer Engineering and related curricula. However, most lab exercises are performed and constrained largely in a self-contained FPGA board. A serial interface is a simple, cost-effective way to connect FPGA board to outside systems. It can be used to control a robot platform, to communicate with desktop computers, to interact with Android devices, to establish a ZigBee wireless link, and to connect to internet. This greatly expands the scope of FPGA based experiments and projects and makes them more interesting and versatile.

Electricity Meter With the Facility to Determine the Quality of the Electricity Supplied

“…The device presented in this paper is based on the latest technology of reconfigurable software systems and has as its main function the metering of electricity and as an auxiliary function the analysis of the quality of electricity at the point of interface between the electricity supplier and the electricity consumer. The device is based on an embedded system built around the MicroBlaze microprocessor configurable by software provided by Xilinx for the latest generation programmable logic arrays (FPGAs) [2][3][4].…”

A Hands-On Experiment to Study the Power and Thermal Characteristics of Digital Systems

“…The block diagram of the subsystem is shown in Figure 7. The thermal monitor core is constructed as an FPro system [3] that contains a MicroBlaze MCS soft-core processor [12], an XADC controller, an I 2 C controller, and a UART (universal asynchronous receiver and transmitter) controller. The XADC controller is configured to obtain the digitized measurements of on-chip temperature, on-chip voltage, and onboard current.…”

“…The thermal and power measurement can be transmitted via the UART port. The UART output can be connected to a PC via a serialto-USB module, or to a smartphone via a Bluetooth serial module, or to a web server via a wifi module [3]. The last option establishes an IoT (internet of things) configuration and allows a remote computer to monitor the thermal condition and the power consumption in real time and to collect data for analysis.…”