Reconfigurable IEEE1451-FPGA based weblab infrastructure

Authors

Abstract

Weblabs are spreading their influence in Science and Engineering (S&E) courses providing a way to remotely conduct real experiments. Typically, they are implemented by different architectures and infrastructures supported by Instruments and Modules (I&Ms;) able to be remotely controlled and observed. Besides the inexistence of a standard solution for implementing weblabs, their reconfiguration is limited to a setup procedure that enables interconnecting a set of preselected I&Ms; into an Experiment Under Test (EUT). Moreover, those I&Ms; are not able to be replicated or shared by different weblab infrastructures, since they are usually based on hardware platforms. Thus, to overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a standard solution that uses I&Ms; embedded into Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGAs) devices. It is presented an architecture based on the IEEE1451.0 Std. supported by a FPGA-based weblab infrastructure able to be remotely reconfigured with I&Ms;, described through standard Hardware Description Language (HDL) files, using a Reconfiguration Tool (RecTool).

Keywords

FPGA IEEE1451.0 Std? Reconfiguration Remote Labs Weblabs

Subject

WebLabs

Conference

REV 2012, 9th International Conference on Remote Engineering and Virtual Instrumentation , June 2012