Tese de Doutorado de Alcides Silveira Costa

DEFESA DE TESE DE DOUTORADO

Aluno: Alcides Silveira Costa
Orientador: Prof. Dr. André Inácio Reis

Título: An emulation-based remote laboratory platform for prototyping digital circuits without FPGAs
Linha de Pesquisa: Ferramentas para Automação de Projeto Eletrônico

Data: 05/06/2023
Horário: 10h
Local: Esta banca ocorrerá de forma híbrida (virtual e presencial), na Sala 215 do Prédio 43412 do Instituto de Informática/UFRGS e pelo link:  https://mconf.ufrgs.br/webconf/00047815  .

Banca Examinadora:
– Prof. Dr. Eric Ericson Fabris (UFRGS/CEITEC)
– Prof. Dr. Calebe Micael de Oliveira Conceição (IFSul)
– Prof. Dr. Luiz Henrique Longhi Rossi (Cognitiva Brasil)
– Prof. Dr. José Rodrigo Furlanetto de Azambuja (UFRGS)

Presidente da Banca: Prof. Dr. André Inácio Reis

Abstract: This thesis presents a novel approach to remotely prototyping digital circuits without FPGA-based prototyping boards. Motivated by the cost of FPGA-based prototyping boards and the mobility restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the thesis presents an emulation-based platform, Pitanga, aiming to reduce hardware costs while allowing students to prototype digital circuits without being physically present in the laboratories of the educational institution. Instead of a physical prototyping board, the student interacts with a lightweight graphical user interface containing a virtual prototyping board on the computer. The platform uses a client-server architecture that offloads the student’s computer by running the design and the emulation software on the server-side. This approach is an alternative to FPGA-based remote laboratories. However, the Pitanga platform responds to the students’ stimuli with no latency and employs general-purpose CPUs to emulate the remote physical FPGA-based prototyping board. The Pitanga platform responds with no latency because it runs a predictive emulator on the server-side that calculates the output for every possible input state of the virtual prototyping board running on the client-side. The results show that the Pitanga platform can emulate a digital circuit of 72,486 transistors at 1Hz system clock. This complexity is the equivalent of an Intel 8086 implemented in NMOS technology or a 1024-bit counter implemented in CMOS technology. Also, the results show that the predictive emulator is O(n) time.

Keywords: Remote laboratory. circuit emulation. engineering education.