Remote FPGA laboratory course development based on an open multimodal laboratory facility

In this paper the implementation of a remote FPGA laboratory course is proposed, based on a low cost but powerful FPGA development board, the ALTERA DE0-Nano which is powered by an Altera Cyclone IV Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) IC. The course is developed based on an open multimodal laboratory facility at the Digital Systems and Media Computing Laboratory of the Hellenic Open University. The course consists of laboratory exercises in the form of VHDL (VHSIC Hardware Description Language) design experiments that the end user can conduct from his or her Personal Computer through a graphical web interface and Altera's Quartus II EDA (Electronic Design Automation) software on hardware that is connected and set-up on a remote server while observing the results in real time. The exercises created for this course are designed to be both educational and interesting while being geared towards entry-level users thus producing a trouble-free RL (Remote Laboratory) that in turn maximizes educational gain.