Week 6
A) Accurate and Factual Information Supported by Evidence (Refereed journals or publications are the ones that contain information reviewed by several experts in the field)
a. Does the information you have located come from authoritative sources?
b. If you obtained the information from a web site, how reliable is the information?
In terms of the information obtained, the papers had some acknowledgments. For example, the paper titled A Web-based Remote FPGA Laboratory for Computer Organization Course was partially supported by the Computer Education Research Association and by the Research & Practice Program of New Engineering Disciplines. Most of the papers were obtain from websites and I think the information should be reliable as most of the papers are from IEEE Xplore website as it is a research database for discovery and access to journal articles, conference proceedings, technical standards, and related materials on computer science, electrical engineering and electronics, and allied fields.
B) The Timeliness of the Publication. (For very current info then timeliness is a must but for historical perspective then timeliness may not be crucial)
a. Is the information timely or out-of-date for your topic?
In terms of timeliness of the publication, the time varies from 2010s and above even some papers are from 2021. So, the information is still considered timely especially virtual laboratory over the internet is relevant.
C) Type of Publication (This indicates different levels of complexity in introducing ideas)
a. Is the source scholarly, popular, trade or government publication?
Most of the sources are mostly scholarly in my opinion as the papers are done by other universities who implemented the similar concept.
For this week, I have reviewed 2 different papers related to virtual laboratory on FPGAs topic.
In the first article titled Remote FPGA Lab for Enhancing Learning of Digital Systems, the article illustrates the operation of the RFLGen program, developed to automate user design VHDL integration into the Xilinx ISE RFL project wrapper for creation of the FPGA configuration bitstream and RFL animations.
In the second article titled A Web-based Remote FPGA Laboratory for Computer Organization Course, a remote FPGA Laboratory based on Open edX cloud-based management server is created to allow queueing of users. The authors set up two queues on the management server, one is for the available devices and the other one is for the waiting users. if the device allocation request arrives, the head of the queue will be removed and assigned to the user.
Week 7
This week I only listed some of the relationship of the proposed idea in terms of daily or routine use, potentials and frequency of use as the week was packed with Test 1 from various subjects.
A) List the relationship of proposed idea to the system/end user/stakeholder in terms of daily or routine.
- End user – Students - The proposed idea of virtual hardware laboratory for remote FPGA experiments will be useful for daily students’ study routine especially for lab subjects or FPGA related courses to use the hardware
- End user – Lecturers – Lecturers can monitor the usage of students using the FPGA virtually through remote control to ensure students can apply their knowledge well practically using hardware.
B) List the relationship of proposed idea to the system/end user/stakeholder in terms potentials.
- It would have the potential to ensure students able to apply their knowledge practically and also reduce the cost of buying FPGAs for huge amount of students individually.
- It can help reduce cost by implementing virtual laboratory using only a few real FPGAs but can be shared among many students.
C) List the relationship of proposed idea to the system/end user/stakeholder in terms of frequency of use.
- The frequency of use would vary depending on the student’s usage during their free time either during daytime or night time. Most probably the usage will be high during night time since students doesn’t have class during the night and able to revise as well.
Week 8
I have created a theoretical framework by having the main theme which is Remote FPGA and other concepts. The concepts are brainstormed and linked with relationships between concepts.
For this week, I have reviewed 2 different papers related to virtual laboratory on FPGAs topic.
In the first article titled RBoot: Software Infrastructure for a Remote FPGA Laboratory, the author uses software to allow students and researchers in geographically distributed locations to remotely access a pool of 64 Xilinx ML-310 Boards over the Internet.
In the second article titled FPGA e-Lab, a Technique to Remote Access a Laboratory to Design and Test, the author used Xilinx SpartanSE Starter Kit whose hardware is interfaced through a laboratory PC via an interactive LabView Graphical User Interface (GUI) and acquisition hardware as well as RS-232 serial and USB ports. Microsoft XP Remote Desktop is the vehicle used to access the Lab PC from a remote location.
Week 9
A conceptual diagram is created based on the previous theoretical framework. The key variables, key relationships and key context factors are identified.
For this week, I have reviewed 2 different papers related to virtual laboratory on FPGAs topic.
In the first article titled Enhancing learning of digital systems using a remote FPGA lab, the author proposed a RemoteFPGA lab that provides interactive control of system inputs, and monitoring of signals at any level of the design hierarchy. Users can also integrate their own HDL design descriptions within a RemoteFPGA HDL-based project template, for synthesis and implementation on the RemoteFPGA.
In the second article titled Advanced Digital Laboratory: An FPGA-Based Remote Laboratory for Teaching Digital Electronics, a development board with an Altera Cyclone II FPGA is connected to a computer implementing the server tier of the iLab batched architecture. The client through which the remote student interacts with the ADLab is implemented with Java, which allows for a reasonable amount of platform independence.