Development of an E-learning FPGA Platform Following the IEEE SA Std. 1876—2019 Standard for Networked Smart Learning Objects for Online Laboratories

To face the low budget issue for undergraduate courses, a common problem faced by South American universities and many other universities and vocational education in developing African countries, we proposed the development of an open platform focused on the learning process of Hardware Description Languages, like VHDL or Verilog. The platform is based on real Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware and was fully integrated into a Learning Management System (LMS), in this case, the Moodle system. It was designed according to good practices complying with the IEEE SA Std. 1876–2019. The idea of following a recognised standard was to make the platform more accessible. Hence, it could be easily adopted by other research groups due to the employment of a well-documented standard. This chapter describes the platform's overall idea and the strategies we adopted to create a first prototype.