Fostering Design Across Multiple Disciplines With Graphical Programming And Fpgas.
Shekhar Sharad, Greg Crouch, Reid Lee, Brian Johnson · 2020
Design has become an essential component of today's engineering education curriculum.However traditional tools and techniques that are primarily text-based have hindered students and professors from taking advantage of the various hardware platforms such as FPGAs that are available in order to be able to teach design effectively.This is especially true for disciplines other than electrical engineering and computer science, where the students are not experts in programming with textual languages.With the evolution of graphical programming tools, it is now possible to leverage the intuitive and powerful technology of graphical programming to target hardware platforms such as FPGAs in order to teach design across multiple disciplines.In this paper we demonstrate a new plug-in that we have built in order to be able to target a commonly used Xilinx Spartan 3E evaluation board with NI LabVIEW, a commonly used graphical programming software.We will also show a demonstration of this plug-in and discuss the pros and cons of such an approach