A major problem in digital system design courses is finding suitable laboratory experiences. As the gate complexities of designs increase, it becomes increasingly difficult to perform prototyping and hardware testing. The nature of digital systems is such that prototyping of a system which is embedded in a testing or operational environment will usually entail the use of numerous chips, even if some full- or semi- custom chips are used. Constructing a board and interconnecting these chips on it using any current technology is expensive and time consuming, as well as requiring of students uncommon technician skills. Poor construction practice produces unreliable, non-maintainable, and degraded performance prototypes. This project provides a low-cost,high-quality, fast prototyping environment to support new field (i.e. student) programmed gate array (FPGA) chips containing thousands of gates. A two-board set (bus extender and prototype) was designed and fabricated for use with inexpensive, easily used, and ubiquitous IBM XT/AT computers in a digital systems lab. The prototype board provides the "glue" needed to support the rapid interconnection and educational use of a digital system having up to two FPGA chips. Once a student designs a digital system and the FPGA chips are programmed, a thousands- of-gates system is testable after a few hours of wire-wrapping. The result is a dramatically improved student prototyping process. Sixty boards were made available to universities nationwide for loan/evaluation.
