Chevron Left
Back to Introduction to FPGA Design for Embedded Systems

Learner Reviews & Feedback for Introduction to FPGA Design for Embedded Systems by University of Colorado Boulder

4.6
stars
1,066 ratings

About the Course

This course can also be taken for academic credit as ECEA 5360, part of CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree. Programmable Logic has become more and more common as a core technology used to build electronic systems. By integrating soft-core or hardcore processors, these devices have become complete systems on a chip, steadily displacing general purpose processors and ASICs. In particular, high performance systems are now almost always implemented with FPGAs. This course will give you the foundation for FPGA design in Embedded Systems along with practical design skills. You will learn what an FPGA is and how this technology was developed, how to select the best FPGA architecture for a given application, how to use state of the art software tools for FPGA development, and solve critical digital design problems using FPGAs. You use FPGA development tools to complete several example designs, including a custom processor. If you are thinking of a career in Electronics Design or an engineer looking at a career change, this is a great course to enhance your career opportunities. Hardware Requirements: You must have access to computer resources to run the development tools, a PC running either Windows 7, 8, or 10 or a recent Linux OS which must be RHEL 6.5 or CentOS Linux 6.5 or later. Either Linux OS could be run as a virtual machine under Windows 8 or 10. The tools do not run on Apple Mac computers. Whatever the OS, the computer must have at least 8 GB of RAM. Most new laptops will have this, or it may be possible to upgrade the memory....

Top reviews

KS

Jul 30, 2020

This is an extremely good course and I learned a lot. Thank you very much sir "Timothy Scherr " and all the people who make this a such a nice one. Also thank you very much "COURSERA" !!!

RD

Oct 24, 2018

Very good course, focused on the quartus prime tool and touch a lot of topics on FPGA design, optimization, time analysis and a little of comparison between Altera and other FPGA vendors.

Filter by:

26 - 50 of 262 Reviews for Introduction to FPGA Design for Embedded Systems

By Adil e m m

•

Jan 13, 2020

HI Iam very happy with this course make me understand what an FPGA ,Ithink it is very good and not forget to thank timothy thank aolt

By Joel M

•

Feb 17, 2019

One of the best class I've attended. Explanations and examples are crystal clear, and the instructor is really good at teaching.

By Safee U R

•

Nov 23, 2021

I would recommend this course for the beginners who have just started digital designing

By 101 A K

•

Dec 17, 2022

the course was awesome. Made me learn more interesting way. Loved the course!!

By Matthew M

•

Jul 23, 2020

This class has deep problems. The first is that the transcription is not where it needs to be, and the resolution of the videos does not compensate for the problem. Filenames are often very important and need to be exact. Yet the transcription often makes mistakes with the filenames and variables. This is where the lack of Youtube resolution comes into play. I can't read individual file and variable names, The result is a lot of guesswork. This could be overcome with high resolution scans of the RTL level diagrams provided the scans were of high enough resolution to read the file and vairable names. Further the class runs on an old version of Quartus Prime, 16.1 while the current version of Quartus is 20.1 (as of this writing). Quartus constantly asks for updates, but those updates often rbeak functionality and make the lessons undoable. This class should be revised to the current version of Quartus Prime. Elements of the class that are survey-like, such as reviews of various FPGA technologies, products, and manuifacturers are good. The information is solid and addresses technical issues I had for my projects. Likewise the introduction to digital logic was well done. It started at a graduate level, which was what I expected and desired. High marks for that.

By PANG I H

•

Nov 7, 2018

I do not recommend for busy working personal. I have to admit I have time problem spent the extra hours to search for external knowledge to complete some of the assignment which wasn't covered in the course. For example, knowledge of how to simplify a 4 bit adder require some level of k-map simplification know how, which forced me to spent the extra hours to google and learn. I originally purchase the cert because it was needed in some of the companies new project. After looking at the time pressure and deadline of the course, I decided to spent time study FPGA at intel youtube and post question at their technical support forum to get my job done.

By Andrea M

•

Jul 29, 2019

For university students in the field of Engineering the course is quite basic, but it is good for having a small introduction on FPGA design, issues, and market.

The main concern is the price (too high, for me it is worth 20$ or something around), and the fact that in the course they don't explain the background of some steps that they do in the Software (it is simply "Select this", "Click this", etc.)

By Adwait K

•

Mar 19, 2018

Not a course to learn a great deal about FPGA's. Seems like an elaborated explanation of a reference manual to use the Quartus Prime software.

By Xiaohang G

•

Aug 23, 2020

no professor answering my any questions

By Carlo D

•

Dec 5, 2020

This course is just a very slow paced and boring tutorial on Quartus Prime. Every lesson is simply a sequence of button to be pressed in Quartus, with no real explanation on why things are done and no room for thinking. Quiz questions are very bad written and show lack of interest in this course. Peer reviewed assignments are a waste of time and mainly consist of screenshots of Quartus reports. If you know digital design already, there is nothing to learn here. Equally, if you don't know it, this won't help you. Not recommented at all, in particular if you hope to learn something about FPGAs.

By Gasper

•

Apr 28, 2018

This course is just weird, too much content crammed into "powerpoint" style of modern education. Buy a book, watch youtube fpga content lecture videos, join a university class,...

By Steaven M M

•

Mar 23, 2021

Resource files not updated or checked to coincide with videos. Videos does not always prompt you when to take screenshots in week 4 until peer assessment section.

By Carlos M

•

Aug 17, 2018

Software cannot be downloaded

By Nigel B

•

Jun 25, 2021

I found the course very good, and of definite practical benefit to me in my work. It is possible that somewhere out there is training for free (with no peer review, no forum, etc), but the structured training and deadlines helped ensure that I got the right information needed to use the Quartus toolchain, and had a go at using them for an extermely reasonable fee - some face-to-face courses on VHDL that I have been on have cost a factor of 70 times more, and have been inflexible and more disruptive to my work life by having to travel some distance on a handful of days to receive the training. This on-line course was indeed demanding (I have a demanding job, and two young children on top of that), but I managed to get it done on time. WIthout the deadlines it probably would have fallen by the wayside.

By Bhushan C P

•

Dec 11, 2017

Ultimate course for FPGA learners those who want to understand complete process of FPGA design for Industry, education & research. Prof. Timothy Scherr and his team had put lot of efforts to make this course perfect. This course is helpful for newbie as well as professionals, As some points explained in this course covers lot of depth in field of FPGA for embedded system with simple explanation.

Thank very much Prof. Timothy Scherr and his teamand also coursera team for bringing such High quality education to all over the world.

By Lalit B

•

Jun 9, 2020

The course is beyond as per the expectations!

The course "Introduction to FPGA Design for Embedded Systems" offered by colorado university is really a wonderful one, especially for the FPGA aspirants and beginners. the course provide a detail inside about the programmable logic devices. the best part was the hands-on practice of the design tool (Quartus Prime). The course flow is good and videos are descriptive. Special thanx to instructor prof. Timothy Scherr. he is a good teacher and his way of explanation is fantastic.

By Zahid S

•

May 15, 2020

Fpga design is a vast jungle, tons of tools, design methodologies, terminologies, design patterns etc. This is just an introductory course that looks at the world of Fpga's through a birds eye view. But the information presented in this course is good enough to start from an intel perspective and apply this knowledge to other platforms like Xilinx or Microsemi. Btw, I also agree with other learners that a lot o cheating is happening in the peer reviewed assignments and something needs to be done about this matter!

By Nicholas B

•

Jan 18, 2021

Great course that directs you through the process of using EDA tools to create designs in your chosen FPGA. While this course focuses on Quartus Prime for Intel/Altera parts, the concepts could easily be applied to other environments. The instructor is easy to understand and follow and the videos ensure that you can keep up with the material. Especially if you have prior logic design knowledge (which you should if you're taking this course).

By Michael W B

•

May 23, 2021

Great introduction to FPGA design. Just the right technical level and pace. I advise downloading the recommended tool version. I installed the latest and had to migrate the IP from the design files each time. The SOPC Edition text is a bit dated, might want to rent a Kindle version. I bought a dev board (DE10-Lite) but I think I could've gotten by just using the BeMicroMax10 design files, as we didn't actually program the board.

By Samer A A

•

Jun 16, 2020

This Course is a good introduction to the FPGA flow in general not just for Altera. It will be very week for someone has previous experience in FPGA design. Regarding this scope, I think the course will be much better if there is a project at the end of course that help the learners coming through the whole flow on their own. I am looking forward to have advanced level for FPGA implementation.

By Roger P

•

Jun 22, 2020

I was actually pleasantly surprised... I am a chip designer and embedded systems software developer... this class gave us the basics and was a survey of FPGA design methodologies and FPGA architecture. While certainly not as comprehensive as a college course, I'd say it was 30% of the knowledge for 20% of the time at 3% of the cost.

By Ming M

•

Dec 23, 2019

A great introduction course for beginners who interested in FPGA design. Basically it covers almost all the use cases for Quartus software, to make students understand the tool, get familiar with the features provided by the tool. Also give students a brief understanding of the FPGA design flow. Overall a great course for beginners.

By MUHAMMAD A

•

Sep 18, 2021

Very thorough and up to date with current industry standards of fpga selection criteria, timing analysis etc. Before learning this course, I really had no idea how could a person select an fpga for their specific task from an enormous catalogue but now I have somewhat developed a basic idea.

By Sunny S

•

May 5, 2022

This course is the perfect blend that covers both theoretical and practical aspects of FPGA design methodology. Instructors are highly eminent and knowledgable. On successful completion of this course, I must recommend this course to those who want to start the journey in FPGA design.

By Heston D J

•

Apr 8, 2021

Fantastic introduction to the Altera (I guess it's now Intel) tools for FPGA Design. As someone whose sole experience up until now has been with Xilinx Vivado: after this course, I feel that with some more practice, I feel I could be ready for a project targeted for an Altera device.