Modular evaluation system for low-power applications: Educating undergraduate students in advanced digital design

Low-power is an important design goal for digital circuits. Accordingly appropriate development tools are necessary to understand, analyze and optimize power consumption. To stimulate students' interests and motivation image processing is a well-suited application. An FPGA board was designed, developed and implemented for a lab setup. The purpose of this lab setup is to enable students to evaluate different implementations of an image processing application as a digital circuit and to estimate the consumed power. The paper points out the benefits of a new modular approach to the lab setup and shows how it supports the design of low-power applications and is well-suited to educate students.