DSD-i1: A Mixed Functionality Development Board Geared Towards Digital Systems Design Education

The present paper describes the design and implementation of a development board, designed in Digital Systems and Media Computing Laboratory of the Hellenic Open University which is very active in the field of digital systems design. The board hosts an MCU and an FPGA on the same PCB, cooperating with tight interconnection between them and supported by a set of basic on-board peripherals that cover some of the most essential educational examples in the field, minimizing the need for external devices. The design is geared i) towards ease of use in order to alleviate any initial setup stress by students or inexperienced designers and ii) towards low-cost fabrication in order to facilitate educational institutions who provide distance education to offer this board to every student for out-of-laboratory usage. The design process, consists of three main stages; the PCB design, the firmware development and the lastly the host computer software development. The architectural and design choices made for each stage are described fully later on the paper with each decision balancing between ease-of-use, cost and functionality, in the form of offered services. The board functions as a very low-cost laboratory educational platform for both low level HDL training as well as higher level MCU Firmware programming, supporting even more complex scenarios of FPGA softcore usage and programming or concurrent usage of FPGA and MCU in complete System-on-Chip (SoC) designs.