Development and Implementation of Remote Laboratory as an Innovative Tool for Practicing Low-Power Digital Design Concepts and Its Impact on Student Learning

Since power dissipation is becoming a significant issue and requiring more consideration in the early design stage, circuit designers must now be experienced in low-power techniques to enhance designing digital systems. Therefore, when teaching low-power design techniques in electrical and computer engineering education, a tool or a method must be made available that enables students to estimate the power dissipation of their digital circuits during the design process. This contribution presents a novel approach, the low-power design remote laboratory system that has been developed at the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences to estimate the power dissipation of a digital circuit remotely via the internet using physical instruments and providing real data. The design takes place at abstraction level and the real data is measured at the low level from the hardware devices. The low level provides more information, which is required for accurately measured values that are hidden at the high level. The technical performance results on using the remote system show that the students are enabled to implement their digital design and to meet the performance targets of reliability as well as to observe almost all influencing factors on the design’s power dissipation.