Should FPGA be integrated into the computer science curriculum?

Question

If computer science is about developing an algorithm and, therefore, is not limited to the imagination of processor suppliers, but belongs to the field of everything that is practically computable. Then FPGA, which is almost ideal for the study of cellular automata, should not be considered a valid platform for the study of computer science. One area of ​​interest where I feel that current curricula are weak is parallelism and integration into programming languages. I think that compiler design could benefit from a curriculum that allowed students to engage in explicit FPGA parallelism.

Answer 1

As a CS student, I would LOVE the FPGA course. However, each is configured differently and does not want to change the curriculum. This is quite difficult in theory, and they think that microcontrollers and FPGAs require too much knowledge about electricity, etc., to be useful for a CS student.

Because of this, I am engaged in electrical engineering.

Answer 2

I honestly think that this would be useful, but I understand that this is a difficult question to answer. Actually, the question is not whether the FPGA course will be valuable (it will obviously be), but will it be valuable enough to drop some other course from the curriculum and replace it with this? My suspicion is that most curricula will not be able to free up enough time to cover it as something other than a belated thought.

Answer 3

Suggest it. Recommend. Do not demand it.

Answer 4

FPGA is great. I have two questions:

• What are the ideas of lasting value that students will still work 20 years after graduation?

• What are you going to eliminate to make room for the FPGA course?

"Education is what remains when knowledge is gone."

Answer 5

As a recent graduate of computer engineering, and having completed several courses in embedded systems, I feel that it will be extremely useful. It would be useful to expand the horizons of standard programming, as well as help the CS student with the most important aspect of the development of embedded systems, which is efficiency. Memory management is critical, and those aspects learned from the FPGA-based course can be carried over to desktop application development. I didn't have to wait years to compile the code, but "Place and Route" is still not my favorite haha ​​phrase. It’s hard for me to say, because I’m not CS, but CpE and I don’t know the exact curriculum. However, I am currently working on desktop applications, and some of the skills that I acquired in my FPGA courses influenced my work. There are my two cents. Enjoy

Answer 6

As a recent graduate of computer science, I would say that FGPA is more in the field of computer or electrical engineering. True, CS is algorithms, but it is also the theory of computation theory, data structures, artificial intelligence, etc. Etc. Etc. I think FGPAs are too specific to be a necessary component. The programming class I took was at a much higher level, but I think it gave a decent introduction to parallelism.

Be that as it may, there were a bunch of top-class classes that I would like to take, but I had no place: quantum computing, building a compiler, real-time system, etc. All of them would be good candidates for inclusion in the main curriculum.

Answer 7

Yes, the FPGA design needs to be integrated into the CS curriculum in one way or another. At least as a laboratory in the field of digital design or parallel computing class. Modern FPGAs are no longer a set of custom logic gates. This is a system on a chip (SoC) with multi-core processors and a rich set of peripherals. I see that more and more engineers with a CS degree and a little hardware make an embedded design on FPGA. To illustrate my point, see the discussions in the section.

Answer 8

Good Lord No. I completed the FPGA course in the last year, and that meant that I had to sit for hours in an hour while my code was compiling. A job in which a student receives a simple code on a blackboard is terrible. To this day, the words "place and route" send a shiver through my spine.