Search

International audience; This paper concerns the local and remote use of an Integrated Circuits (IC) Automated Test Equipment (ATE) for both educational and engineering purposes. This experience was initiated in 1998 in the context of a French network (CNFM) in order to provide a distant control to industrial equipment for academic and industrial people. The actual shared resource is a Verigy V93K System on Chip (SoC) tester platform. The cost of such an equipment is close to 1M€, without taking into account the maintenance and attached human resources expenses to make it work properly daily. Although the sharing of this equipment seems to be obvious for education, the French experience is quite a unique example in the world. Here, practical information regarding IC testing and network setup for remote access are detailed, together with the associated training program.

The aim of this work is to develop a simultaneous multi user access system â?? READ (Remote ASIC Design and Test) that allows users to perform test and measurements remotely via clients running on mobile devices as well as on standard PCs. The system also facilitates the remote design of circuits with the PAC-Designer The system is controlled by LabVIEW and was implemented using a Data Acquisition Card from National instruments. Such systems are specially suited for manufacturing process monitoring and control. The performance of the simultaneous access was tested under load with a variable number of users. The server implements a queue that processes userâ??s commands upon request.

SDRAM (Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory) demand has grown exponentially since the 1980s, as a result of technological factors and new areas of application, particularly concerning communication and consumer electronics. The SDRAM market represented in 2007 c. 20% of the total semiconductor business and is seen as a strategic area, justifying private and public investment in the western and far-eastern economic communities. SDRAM test education is therefore an important subject, but very high purchase and maintenance costs keep test equipment beyond reach of most university test courses. This paper presents a pilot project addressing an SDRAM test education course developed jointly by Qimonda and the University of Porto (FEUP), where the company offers remote access to one if its Advantest SDRAM automatic test equipments. Access to this remote tester was embedded into the Moodle e-learning server that supports a new course entitled Electronic Systems Testing (TSEL), which is part of the Integrated Masters degree on Electrical and Computer Engineering at FEUP. The excellent feedback received from students encouraged us to extend this cooperation into an educational network, which is also introduced in this paper.

This contribution describes the concept and implementation for an integration of microcontroller and FPGA based Rapid Prototyping modules into a Remote Lab system. This implementation enables a Web-based access to electro-mechanical models. A student uploads a source file implementation to the Remote Lab server in order to test an implementation directly within a hardware environment. The Remote Lab server offers the interfaces to integrate specific project and hardware plug-ins. These plug-ins access a hardware specific software environment to automatically compile and program the resulting firmware. To stimulate this design, the Remote Lab server exchanges digital signals via a serial interface. To allow the student to compare architectures of different designs using the same hardware model, a specific controller (using the Remote Lab interface) can be selected. For this, an IP-based multiplexer provides the control connection between the respective controller and the hardware model. In our contribution we would like to give examples of such a complex design task and how the students can use different tools during several design steps.

The Signal Processing Department (ASB) at Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) has created two online lab workbenches; one for electrical experiments and one for mechanical vibration experiments, mimicking and supplementing workbenches in traditional laboratories. For several years now, the workbenches have been used concurrently with on-site ones in regular, supervised lab sessions. The students are encouraged to use them on a 24/7 basis for example, in preparation for supervised sessions. The electronic workbench can be used simultaneously by many students. The aim of a project known as VISIR (Virtual Systems in Reality) founded by ASB at the end of 2006, is to disseminate the online lab workbenches using open source technologies. The goal is to create a template for a grid laboratory where the nodes are workbenches for electrical experiments, located at different universities. This paper focuses on standards, pedagogical aspects, and measurement procedure requirements.

Nowadays there is a great number of universities and organizations working in e-learning and i-learning solutions. One of the most well-known is the learning management system or LMS that allows displaying theoretical content in an organized and controlled way. In some jobs and studies it is necessary for the student to get a practical knowledge as well as a theoretical one. To obtain this practical knowledge, the universities and organizations are developing Virtual, Remote and Web labs. At these moments the LMS and Web labs are working independently. We are studying a new architecture allowing the integration of the LMS with different Web labs. This architecture must allow the students, teachers and administrators to use the services of LMS and virtual lab’s features as if they were working with the same software.

UNEDLabs is a web portal based on a free, modern, open source, and well-known learning management system: Moodle. This portal joins two theme networks of virtual and remote laboratories (one for Control Engineering and another one for Physics, named AutomatL@bs and FisL@bs, respectively) together. AutomatL@bs has been operative for five years now. Following AutomatL@bsâ?? scheme, FisL@bs was created as a network of remote and virtual laboratories for physics university education via the Internet to offer students the possibility of performing hands-on experiences in different fields of physics in two ways: simulation and real remote operation. Now, both FisL@bs and AutomatL@bs join together (while maintaining their independency) into an unique new web portal called UNEDLabs. This work focuses on this new web environment and gives a detailed account of a novel way in Physics to let distance learning students gain practical experience autonomously. This paper explains how the new portal works and the software tools used for creating it. In addition, it also describes the physics experiments which are already operative.