About

FPGA4U is a pedagogical initiative of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences of EPFL. It is partly supported by Altera and Cypress, which kindly donated their components used in the board. Visit our credits page to see who worked on the project so far--we hope that many more students will contribute with their enthusiasm in the future. Since 2006, all students entering the 1st year of the BSc programmes in Computer Science and in Communication Systems receive an FPGA4U board.

The basic idea behind FPGA4U is that it is extremely easy for students to play with software (just get any PC, download an open source operating system, and you have taken off) but experimenting with hardware design is increasingly difficult. There was a time when discrete logic components (e.g., 74xxx, 40xx) would make it possible to assemble little but meaningful inexpensive circuits. Nowadays, FPGAs are offering much more potential, but are hard to obtain and use for most of the students. FPGA4U wants to change this situation and offer a simple and accessible powerful platform.

In this Wiki, you will find here all necessary information about the board and some tutorials to get started. We wish users will want to share their experiences and improve this Wiki with more information, more sample designs, and more cool application ideas. Also feel free to add content under the community portal pages.

Inquiries and usage questions can be directed to fpga4u at epfl dot ch or to the helpdesk.