NI reveals digital learning tool

National Instruments has unveiled a digital learning tool that gives high school, university and vocational students experience with digital logic and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology.

The NI Digital Electronics FPGA board, which integrates with the NI educational laboratory virtual instrumentation suite (NI ELVIS) II and NI ELVIS II+ educational design and prototyping platforms, combines analogue and digital design instruction in one affordable platform.

When combined with NI ELVIS, this system eliminates the need for multiple sets of instrumentation to teach analogue and digital electronics concepts, saving money and space for educational institutions.

The board is a result of the NI collaboration with Xilinx, a supplier of programmable logic devices and inventor of FPGA technology, and has already been slated for adoption by Project Lead The Way (PLTW), one of America's providers of pre-engineering and science curricula.

The FPGA-based hardware is designed to be programmed with the NI Labview graphical programming environment and Xilinx ISE tools.

With its adoption by PLTW, the FPGA board will be incorporated into US high school technology curricula, and thousands of students will gain experience that correlates directly to real-world industrial and scientific applications of FPGA programming.

The centrepiece of the NI Digital Electronics FPGA board is a Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA, which can be programmed using NI Labview or the Xilinx ISE Webpack, a free, downloadable software toolkit.

Through the NI Developer Zone, educators can view related tutorials and download free curricula written to use with Labview and Verilog.

The NI ELVIS platform includes 12 instruments, including a function generator, digital multimeter (DMM) and a 100MS/s oscilloscope on the NI ELVIS II+.

Students using the NI Digital Electronics FPGA board can learn circuit concepts by taking advantage of the NI Multisim circuit design and Spice simulation platform, and the NI Multisim circuit design community, an online resource for collaboration and discussion of circuit design topics.

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