Open Education Teaching Unit for Low-Power Design and FPGA Image Processing

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents an open educational resource (OER) teaching unit to consider power consumption and image processing as advanced topics in a digital design course. Fundamentals of digital design are well covered by traditional teaching materials such as textbooks and in hands-on laboratories. New approaches with e-learning material are being developed and described in literature. This material includes web-based animations, lecture videos, tools for graphical simulation, and remote labs. This contribution presents teaching material for advanced learners and combines lecture videos and a remote lab, including suggestions for design experiments. This approach allows for integration into existing courses, where the material can be used as supplementary material. Depending on the lecturer’s needs and interests, the focus can be on aspects such as circuit architecture and verification, image processing algorithms, and power consumption of the design with comparison of different CMOS technologies. Lecture videos and a remote lab are used in a regular course at the authors’ university, so maintenance of the teaching material is ensured. The learning material has been evaluated through student feedback at our university and at two partner universities which adopted the teaching material. Access to the teaching material is monitored, giving further insight into usage by students of these institutions as well as by independent learners.

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