SF3: A scalable and flexible FPGA-framework for education and rapid prototyping

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) are becoming increasingly important in many digital systems due to their high performance and flexibility. The efficient utilization of programmable logic is still complex and requires in-depth knowledge. Therefore, understanding the basic principles of such devices and hardware description languages is of vital importance not only for students of electrical engineering. At best, even schoolchildren should have the opportunity to learn something about FPGAs early on in their education. To enable an easier access to programmable logic, many development kits are available. There are still many obstacles to working with such kits, especially for beginners. Therefore, a new flexible VHDL framework with cross-platform toolchain for simulation and synthesis is presented in this paper. The new system allows a simple and intuitive method to implement FPGA applications, while maintaining the characteristics of logic design. By this means the complexity of implementation-tasks for beginners becomes scalable. The framework is already successfully used in a national logic design contest for schoolchildren. It is easy to use and offers a large range of functionality. The new system is therefore also suitable for rapid prototyping in research projects.