Building an Evolvable Low-Cost HW/SW Educational Platform--Application to Virtual Instrumentation

This paper describes a hardware/software FPGA-based platform. Its goal is to provide a reusable low-cost system for teaching system-level design, with an emphasis on design reuse as an effective mean to cope with an ever growing design complexity. An open source strategy promotes cross-university collaboration by relying on previously developed software. The first implementation examples target the area of Reconfigurable Virtual Instrumentation (RVI), which in turn provides a low-cost solution for teaching electronic instrumentation.