A Low Cost and Interactive Rapid Prototyping Platform for Digital System Design Education

In this paper, we describe a cost-effective FPGA-based logic circuit emulation platform. It consists of a hardware engine to emulate the circuits and software for the user interface to drive the emulation and monitor the results. It is a very flexible and powerful design verification platform. Additionally, its economical price makes it possible to assign an FPGA (field programmable gate array) prototyping board to every student. This system provides an interactive verification environment using a communication protocol through bi-directional serial link, like the RS232C. Our system has the potential to meet market demands, especially in the educational field, which requires a low cost and yet powerful verification methods for digital hardware design.