A time-sharing remote laboratory for hardware design and experiment with shared resources and service management

A new remote laboratory system for learning hardware designs and experiment of digital circuits has been developed. Wide use of the Internet motivated us to develop seamless remote and actual hardware laboratories for hardware design laboratory course. Unlike existing virtual laboratories, the proposed remote laboratory utilizes actual hardware and actual measurement tools in a time sharing fashion. Hardware experimental environment is usually treated as an exclusive resource, for single user usage. However, the actual test run time is rather short and most of the time is wasted leaving those precious resources idle. To make those resources operate more efficiently, it employs shared resources and enhanced service management scheme based on the Web services. It finds an available service site and schedules the executable processing. The combinatorial use of FPGA/PC connected test hardware and PC based measurement equipments such as logic analyzer or pattern generator has make it possible to develop a remote multi-user time sharing hardware experiment system, where students at remote sites can perform actual experiments using actual hardware equipments and tools concurrently. As all students are equipped with high performance laptop PCs, CPU intensive tasks such as development of the digital circuits for FPGA can be off-loaded from the server host and can be performed by each student´s client PC. A floating license scheme allows students through the Internet to utilize commercial FPGA development tools. Thus, we created virtual private network to access the floating license server over firewalls. Such a rich client configuration allows the server to concentrate on the service management tasks, such as hardware resource managements. The prototype system is scheduled to be used for the third grade CS students from year 2005.