Studies on the Necessity to Integrate the FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) Circuits in the Digital Electronics Lab Didactic Activity

The FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) circuits contain programmable logic components and are increasingly popular in implementing the applications for obtaining and processing signals. FPGA represents a modern development trend in digital electronics. The integration in the work with students of this trend is a difficult task, but also useful, because many students face problems when they must use a design environment. The application of FPGA technology can be useful to students either for the laboratory work on advanced topics, or for obtaining skills to use an industry standard design environment. The purpose of this paper is to conduct studies on the need to integrate the FPGA digital electronics trend in the laboratory didactic activity of the students. As case study, we present the design of a control circuit and its implementation in a FPGA, i.e. on a Basys2 board with Xilinx programming environment.