FPGA remote laboratory: experience of a shared laboratory between UPNA and UNIFESP

For teaching hardware design, FPGAs are a powerful technology, where students can learn how to design hardware using common hardware description languages such as VHDL or Verilog. However, the use of FPGAs in the classroom has several different problems, such as availability or associated costs of acquiring and maintaining the FPGAs, and relying on FPGA boards in the classroom is typically problematic because students cannot use the boards for doing projects after classes or during weekends. To solve this problem, remote laboratories can help allowing more flexibility to students. A remote laboratory is a hardware and software system that allows students to access a real FPGA located somewhere else on the Internet. In this article, a cross-national remote laboratory is presented. This remote laboratory has multiple copies (17 devices at the time of this writing) deployed both in UPNA (Spain) and UNIFESP (Brazil), and using EdTech LabsLand (Spain) for technology and management of the laboratory. Students of both institutions access transparently these laboratories, providing automatic fault tolerance and increasing the number of concurrent students using the laboratories by sharing the boards among both institutions **Thanks to the financial contribution made by UPNA and UNIFESP Universities for the acquisition of the necessary material for the development of the laboratories and the donation of the Terasic DE1-SoC kits made by Intel.