Luckily, the emergence of high performance Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) now provides us with a good alternative to the venerable proto-board. FPGAs allow students to directly construct modern architectures by virtualizing system wiring instead of system architecture. To be sure, the loss those yellow wire strippers is sad, but the benefits of their elimination are many.
This talk will introduce a new laboratory substrate for computer engineering based on FPGAs. We have designed and constructed small, scalable modules that can be physically interconnected in 1-D rows, 2-D arrays, and the 3-D tetrahedral (diamond) lattice. All wiring (with the exception of analog interfaces, which are still done with protoboards) is done on the computer screen and simulations are used as an integral component of the design process. The new modules provide high density logic and high density interconnect at moderately high execution speed. By taking advantage of distributed synchronous clocking, issues of clock skew are eliminated. This electrical scalability, along with the physical scalability of the modules, has allowed teams of students in trial sections this term to combine resources with much less effort than in the past.
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Modified: Jun 24, 1997|
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