Design and Implementation of a Remote FPGA iLab

There exists a wide array of approaches to the development of remote laboratories. A notably effective one is the iLabs architecture. It separates the remote laboratory into three tiers; service broker, lab server and client and specifies the mode of interaction between these tiers. The internet is the channel of communication, and web services are the protocol for interaction between the tiers. Several activities were undertaken in order to realize the Digital Electronics interactive Laboratory using FPGAs based on the MIT iLabs Shared Architecture. These include formulating of requirements for the system, designing of the laboratory conceptual framework, configuration of the ISA, development of Virtual instruments using LabVIEW and the development of relevant documentation. The laboratory is designed to support experiments in digital electronics in the Faculty of Technology. Using this system, the user is able to investigate the behavior of three digital circuit experiments; the 3-bit carry look-ahead full adder, 4-bit synchronous up/down counter and the 4-bit bidirectional universal shift register.