Electrical Engineering UPH Holds the FPGA Workshop with Dr. Ian Grout from the University of Limerick, Ireland

Department of Electrical Engineering UPH holds a workshop with the topic ,”Electronic System Design with FPGAs and an overview of design approaches using Altera Quartus II” presented by Dr. Ian Grout from the University of Limerick, Ireland. The workshop will be held in a series of four meetings, on January 19, January 21, February 2, and February 4, 2016.

The arrival of Dr. Ian Grout, is the realization of the staff exchange program of Erasmus Mundus LEADERS (www.emleaders.eu) activities in which the Department of Electrical Engineering is involved in a consortium with 22 universities from the EU and Asia (http://ee.fast.uph.edu/component/wmnews/new/8-kerjasama-jurusan-t-elektro-uph-dengan-22-universitas-uni-eropa-dan-asia-dalam-proyek-erasmus-mundus.html).

Dr. Grout has the expertise and research interests in the field of electronics, in particular FPGA and microcontroller, remote laboratories, IC testing, mixed-signal design and simulation. Dr. Grout has produced more than 80 conference papers and international journals papers and wrote two textbooks on the topic of FPGA and IC Testing published by Springer and Newnes / Elsevier which can be accessed through Google Book (https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=Ian+grout).

In the first session, January 19, 2016, Dr. Grout discuss the basics of  FPGA and the introduction to Altera Quartos Software. FPGA is Field Programmable Gate Array which is an integrated circuit (IC) that contains the logic gates cells, interconnections and input / output cells. FPGA is an IC containing a circuit that can be programmed or configured in the field, so that any changes or modifications to the hardware to create a different circuit is done by reprogramming, even when the IC is already in use. The uses of FPGA provide advantages over the use of microcontroller for processing in the FPGA is done in hardware, so that it can be faster.

In addition to discussing what is FPGA, Dr. Grout also describes the types of FPGA, and its applications, one of which is to perform a simple logic circuit simulation and programming to Altera Cyclone II FPGA using Altera Quartos II software. Altera Quartos II is an EDA (electronic design automation, CAD for electronics) software that is usually used to create a design to perform design simulation logic operations, and of course to prepare HDL program, compile and programmed into the supported FPGA chips. In addition to providing an explanation, Dr. Grout also gave a demonstration of simulation time diagram simulation and making simple test bench with Altera Quartos II and Cyclone II FPGA programming in Altera DE II development board.