EWDTS’2009 Moscow, September 18 - 20, 2009

1. Alexander Sudnitson Tallinn University of Technology EWDTS’2009 Moscow, September 18-20, 2009 Advanced Topics of FSM Design Using FPGA Educational Boards and Web-Based Tools “LEARNING BY DOING”

2. Motivation • Digital design courses are offered at technical universities throughout the world. However, there is still an extensive search over the best way to organize them. • Educational tool that can be used to enhance the teaching of reconfigurable systems and the self-learning process that is critical for all engineering students. • Encourage students to learn advanced topics of digital design using new web-based tools.

3. Laboratory equipment • Our approach is related to educational methods based on the principle "learning by doing", and uses as support FPGA boards because they are low-cost and powerful. • Students are provided with three models of development boards: Digilent's Spartan‑3 Starter Kit board and Spartan‑3E Starter Kit board, and SLS's UP3 Education Kit board. Boards feature FPGAs from Xilinx and Altera, two of the leading programmable logic devices manufacturers.

4. Educational Board Educational boards combine the advanced features of FPGA with straightforward power supply and I/O circuits, making it the perfect platform for designs ranging from simple logic circuits to complex digital systems.

5. Professional software environment • Manufacturers provide all the necessary software for FPGA design flow (Integrated Software Environment (WebPack for Xilinx devices, Quartus-II Web Edition for Altera devices). • The design suites support all steps of the FPGA design flow (design entry, simulation, synthesis, translation and device configuration). Both may be freely downloaded (after registration) by students, which permits to continue working on projects outside university.

6. FSM Sub-FSM 1 1 outputs inputs outputs inputs 2 Sub-FSM 2 3 n Network of FSMs FSM Decomposition Problem of representing prototype FSM by network of interconnected and interacting sub-FSMs 

7. Web-based tools • Provide easily accessible tools for educational and demonstration purposes • Be powerful enough in order to carry out scientific experiments • Result: D&S environment

8. 1) Prepare source data 2) Perform decomposition 3) Analyze and export results Network Probabilities Analyzer FSM Partitions Complexity Analyzer Built-in libraries Random Generator Partition Search Export: VHDL,BLIF (network), KISS2 (sub-FSMs) Import: KISS2 Workflow process

9. Screenshot of GUI module

10. Education-specific • GUI version of software • Can be accessed over Internet or run locally • Web-page that describes theoretical background and contains manuals • A lot of examples

11. Research-specific • GUI modules are duplicated by their command-line versions • Built-in libraries that contain set of benchmarks • Supports several formats to import source data and export results (BLIF, KISS2, VHDL)

12. st4 p4 = 0.2348 st3 p3 = 0.2348 st5 p5 = 0.2348 p2 = 0.0783 st2 st0 p0 = 0.1130 st1 p1 = 0.1043 FSM Stochastic Explorer

13. Concluding remarks • The main goal was to find a compromise of what students would like to do and what they are actually able to fulfill. Students enjoyed project-like nature of the assignments and were very active in proposing their own tasks and ideas. • The use of FPGA technology in digital design education can add a certain level of realism to the learning experience. It may simply help to boost students' motivation, as they see their ideas get actually implemented and working.