- This full paper addresses an innovative practice in the experimental teaching/learning in Engineering courses. Engineering is a practical profession where doing is the key. Experimental work and the immersing in the lab environment (hands-on, simulations, remote labs) helps students to construct and strengthen their knowledge. The VISIR+ Project (ERASMUS+), launched in November 2015 and concluded in Abril 2018, intended to disseminate VISIR - Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (the most used remote lab in electric and electronics area of expertise) in Latin American countries (Argentina and Brazil) by installing a system in five Higher Educational Institutions. It involved 13 educational institutions, 25 different courses, several of them with successive didactical implementations. It comprised 49 teachers and 1,595 students. During the project about 27 research papers were published disseminating the projects' results. At the end of the project, the expectations were that the impact could remain in the long-term promoting VISIR remote lab and the dissemination of good practices. The project ended four years ago, and each installed VISIR system continued to promote teaching diversification using different experimental resources (including VISIR) then contributing to student learning. The aim of this work is to understand the impact of these didactical practices while using VISIR in these last years. This study was based on a questionnaire complemented with an interview with each person of contact. The results point to an increase of VISIR's usage in almost all institutions, particularly during the pandemic period. Overall, the educational impact involved more than 23 different institutions, 45 courses (most of them with several editions), 118 teachers and 4,866 students. The impact in the scientific community implied additional 31 publications with VISIR as its main core. These numbers support the sustainability of the VISIR+ project over the years, positively contributing to a more diversified engineering education of these students and their experimental competences development.

In recent years, bibliometrics has been widely used as a methodology for the analysis of scientific production, proving to be an excellent instrument for supporting scientific policy decisions. In this paper, we present a bibliometric analysis of the 12 editions of the Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON). Several indicators were used, namely number of submitted articles, the rate of accepted submissions, number of article citations, and the number of references per article, among other indicators. We also intend to add the comparison of the results obtained in the ten first editions held in-site and the last two editions, which have the particularity of having been carried out fully online, evaluating, by this way, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis to EDUCON. The results show an increase in the number of papers submitted and published over the years, evidencing a growing notoriety of the conference. The same growth tendency is visible regarding the number of authors involved in the conference. Regarding the impact of the online editions, data from the next edition is still required to establish better comparisons and conclusions.

This document reflects the contribution of a group of experts in the VISIR (Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality) remote lab, regarding recent advances, initiatives, federation, limitations and future. The methodology for gathering their opinion consisted of a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis on VISIR, following three categories: Technical, Pedagogical and Educational. Major conclusions point to: (1) a need for new technical developments taking advantage of collaborative work; (2) a window of opportunity for expanding VISIR to other institutions, namely in developing countries; and (3) improving the interface for a better pedagogical experience, namely with better error feedback or the inclusion of a virtual tutor.

In this paper we present a bibliometrics analysis of the 10 editions of the Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON). EDUCON is a conference of the IEEE Education Society for region 8. It started in 2010 and since then it is organized annually. With this study we intend to analyze the growth of the conference, namely through the evolution of the number of submissions/publications, and the number of citations per article. We also intend to analyze the number of references per article. A descriptive statistics of these indicators is done along the paper. With an initial set of 10 editions, it will be possible to investigate the impact of future editions, by performing a sliding-frame analysis, i.e. replacing the oldest by the newest edition and analyzing how this impacts the presented charts.

During experiments with electric circuits, students often make mistakes. To handle these situations, remote laboratories such as VISIR (Virtual Instruments Systems in Reality) rely on error-handling mechanisms, which do not always cover all errors. This article seeks to extend a previously published work when trying to assimilate all possible errors in alternated current circuits with a single power supply and a single passive component. The goal is to build an errors’ map with all possible errors, covering all circuits that can be assembled in VISIR, from the simplest to the most complex. This allows limiting misconceptions during theoretical and practical understanding are limited.

Social demands have promoted an educational approach based on an “anywhere and anytime” premise. Remote laboratories have emerged as the answer to the demands of technical educational areas for adapting themselves to this scenario. The result has not only benefit distance learning students but has provided new learning scenarios both for teachers and students as well as allowing a flexible approach to experimental topics. However, as any other solution for providing practical scenarios (hands-on labs, virtual labs or simulators), remote labs face several constraints inherited from the subsystems of its deployment -hardware (real instruments, equipment and scenario) and software (analog/digital conversions, communications, workbenches, etc.)-. This paper describes the Erasmus+ project Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of visiR (PILAR) which deals with several units of the federation installed in different educational institutions and devoted to analog electronics and electrical circuits. Based on the limitations of remote labs, the need for the federation will be justified and its benefits will be described.

The PILAR (Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of visiR) Erasmus Plus project started in September 2016 and will last three years. The core of the PILAR project is the VISIR remote laboratory -Virtual Instruments System In Reality-. The project aims for a federation of five of the existing VISIR nodes, sharing experiments, capacity and resources among partners, and to provide access to VISIR remote lab, through PILAR consortium, to students from other educational institutions. PILAR will be the framework from which management tasks will be performed and laboratories/experiments will be shared. PILAR will also foster the Special Interest Group of VISIR under the Global Online Laboratory Consortium (GOLC) of the International Association of Online Engineering (IAOE).

This paper describes how the Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED) is currently sharing its educational experience on collaborative labs environments with an Argentinean University: the Santiago del Estero National University. This experience takes place within a wider framework provided by the VISIR+ project, which aims to define, implement and evaluate a set of educational modules following an Enquiry-based Teaching and Learning Methodology supported by the VISIR remote lab.

Engineering and science labs play a central role in illustrating concepts and principles as well as improving technical skills. Through introducing of remote labs, it will be possible to share devices, equipment and instrumentations with lots of universities. Moreover, they relax time and space constraints and are capable to be adapted to pace of each student if there was insufficient time in lab; this contribution reports the experiences at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem in Palestine with deploying VISIR, and represents the results of an evaluation for its appropriateness as a complementary asset to traditional labs. The questionnaire for the interaction between students and VISIR includes survey questions with the goal to measure the evaluation criteria: usefulness and satisfaction, sense of reality/immersion and usability.

This work presents a comparative study covering four different courses lectured at the Polytechnic of Porto - School of Engineering, in respect to the usage of a particular Learning Management System, i.e. Moodle, and its impact on students' results. Even though positive correlation factors exist, e.g. between the number of Moodle accesses versus the final exam grade obtained by each student, the explanation behind it may not be straightforward. Mapping this particular factor to course numbers reveals that the quality of the resources might be preponderant and not only their quantity. This paper also addresses teachers who used this platform as a complement to their courses (b-learning) and identifies some particular issues they should be aware in order to potentiate students' engagement and learning.

In this paper the authors intend to demonstrate the utilization of remote experimentation (RE) using mobile computational devices in the Science areas of the elementary school, with the purpose to develop practices that will help in the assimilation process of the subjects taught in classroom seeking to interlink them with the daily students' activities. Allying mobility with RE we intend to minimize the space-temporal barrier giving more availability and speed in the information access. The implemented architecture utilizes technologies and freely distributed softwares with open code resources besides remotes experiments developed in the Laboratory of Remote Experimentation (RExLab) of Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), in Brazil, through the physical computation platform of the “open hardware” of self-construction type. The utilization of open code computational tools and the integration of hardware to the 3D virtual worlds, accessible through mobile devices, give to the project an innovative face with a high potential for reproducibility and reusability.

The use of remote labs in undergraduate courses has been reported in literature several times since the mid 90's. Nevertheless, very few articles present results about the correspondent learning gains obtained by students, and in what conditions those systems can be more efficient, thus suggesting a lack of data concerning their pedagogical effectiveness. This paper addresses such a gap by presenting some initial findings concerning the use of a remote lab (VISIR), in a large undergraduate course on Physics, with over 550 students enrolled.

Practical sessions are the backbone of qualification in engineering education. It leads to a better understanding and allows mastering scientific concepts and theories. The lack of the availability of practical sessions at many universities and institutions owing to the cost and the unavailability of instructors the most of the time caused a significant decline in experimentation in engineering education over the last decades. Recently, with the progress of computer-based learning, remote laboratories have been proven to be the best alternative to the traditional ones, regarding to its low cost and ubiquity. Some universities have already started to deploy remote labs in their practical sessions. This contribution compiles diverse experiences based on the deployment of the remote laboratory, Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR), on the practices of undergraduate engineering grades at various universities within the VISIR community. It aims to show the impact of its usage on engineering education concerning the assessments of students and teachers as well.

This paper proposes an online mechanism that can evaluate the sensitivity of single event upsets (SEUs) of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The online detection mechanism cyclically reads and compares the values form the external and internal configuration memories, taking into account the mask information. This remote detection method also signals any mismatch as a result of a SEU that affects both used and not-used FPGA parts, which maximizes the monitored area. By utilizing an external, Web-accessible controller that is connected to the test infrastructure, the possibility of running the same operation in a remote manner is enabled. Moreover, the need for a local memory to store the mask values is also eliminated.

Dynamically reconfigurable SRAM-based field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) enable the implementation of reconfigurable computing systems where several applications may be run simultaneously, sharing the available resources according to their own immediate functional requirements. To exclude malfunctioning due to faulty elements, the reliability of all FPGA resources must be guaranteed. Since resource allocation takes place asynchronously, an online structural test scheme is the only way of ensuring reliable system operation. On the other hand, this test scheme should not disturb the operation of the circuit, otherwise availability would be compromised. System performance is also influenced by the efficiency of the management strategies that must be able to dynamically allocate enough resources when requested by each application. As those resources are allocated and later released, many small free resource blocks are created, which are left unused due to performance and routing restrictions. To avoid wasting logic resources, the FPGA logic space must be defragmented regularly. This paper presents a non-intrusive active replication procedure that supports the proposed test methodology and the implementation of defragmentation strategies, assuring both the availability of resources and their perfect working condition, without disturbing system operation.

To boost logic density and reduce per unit power consumption SRAM-based FPGAs manufacturers adopted nanometric technologies. However, this technology is highly vulnerable to radiation-induced faults, which affect values stored in memory cells, and to manufacturing imperfections. Fault tolerant implementations, based on Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) infrastructures, help to keep the correct operation of the circuit. However, TMR is not sufficient to guarantee the safe operation of a circuit. Other issues like module placement, the effects of multi- bit upsets (MBU) or fault accumulation, have also to be addressed. In case of a fault occurrence the correct operation of the affected module must be restored and/or the current state of the circuit coherently re-established. A solution that enables the autonomous restoration of the functional definition of the affected module, avoiding fault accumulation, re-establishing the correct circuit state in real-time, while keeping the normal operation of the circuit, is presented in this paper.

To increase the amount of logic available to the users in SRAM-based FPGAs, manufacturers are using nanometric technologies to boost logic density and reduce costs, making its use more attractive. However, these technological improvements also make FPGAs particularly vulnerable to configuration memory bit-flips caused by power fluctuations, strong electromagnetic fields and radiation. This issue is particularly sensitive because of the increasing amount of configuration memory cells needed to define their functionality. A short survey of the most recent publications is presented to support the options assumed during the definition of a framework for implementing circuits immune to bit-flips induction mechanisms in memory cells, based on a customized redundant infrastructure and on a detection-and-fix controller.

Dependability is a critical factor in computer systems, requiring high quality validation & verification procedures in the development stage. At the same time, digital devices are getting smaller and access to their internal signals and registers is increasingly complex, requiring innovative debugging methodologies. To address this issue, most recent microprocessors include an on-chip debug (OCD) infrastructure to facilitate common debugging operations. This paper proposes an enhanced OCD infrastructure with the objective of supporting the verification of fault-tolerant mechanisms through fault injection campaigns. This upgraded on-chip debug and fault injection (OCD-FI) infrastructure provides an efficient fault injection mechanism with improved capabilities and dynamic behavior. Preliminary results show that this solution provides flexibility in terms of fault triggering and allows high speed real-time fault injection in memory elements

The new generations of SRAM-based FPGA (field programmable gate array) devices are the preferred choice for the implementation of reconfigurable computing platforms intended to accelerate processing in real-time systems. However, FPGA's vulnerability to hard and soft errors is a major weakness to robust configurable system design. In this paper, a novel built-in self-healing (BISH) methodology, based on run-time self-reconfiguration, is proposed. A soft microprocessor core implemented in the FPGA is responsible for the management and execution of all the BISH procedures. Fault detection and diagnosis is followed by repairing actions, taking advantage of the dynamic reconfiguration features offered by new FPGA families. Meanwhile, modular redundancy assures that the system still works correctly

The aim of this article is to present an algorithm for interpreting condition/event Petri Nets for real-time control of discrete event systems. A brief exposition of the new challenges in manufacturing systems is made, explaining some features of multiprocessing, resource sharing, and reducing product life cycles, which increase the complexity of the related control programs. Next, it is shown that the programming languages in IEC 61131-3 are unsuitable for dealing with this complexity problem, and the condition/event Petri Net is presented as a possible solution. Then, the concept of condition/event Petri Nets is briefly explained, to introduce the algorithm itself afterwards. This algorithm is object-oriented, which increase its reuse/improvement potential. Finally, a runtime analysis of the algorithm is presented.

This paper presents the first truly non-intrusive structural concurrent test approach, aimed to test partial and dynamically reconfigurable SRAM-based FPGAs without disturbing their operation. This is accomplished by using a new methodology to carry out the replication of active configurable logic blocks (CLBs), i.e. CLBs that are part of an implemented function that is actually being used by the system, releasing it to be tested in a way that is completely transparent to the system.

The increasing complexity of VLSI circuits and the reduced accessibility of modern packaging and mounting technologies restrict the usefulness of conventional in-circuit debugging tools, such as in-circuit emulators for microprocessors and microcontrollers. However, this same trend enables the development of more complex products, which in turn require more powerful debugging tools. These conflicting demands could be met if the standard scan test infrastructures now common in most complex components were able to match the debugging requirements of design verification and prototype validation. This paper analyses the main debug requirements in the design of microprocessor-based applications and the feasibility of their implementation using the mandatory, optional and additional operating modes of the standard IEEE 1149.1 test infrastructure.

A set of board-level testability blocks is proposed in this paper, with the aim of improving the fault coverage achievable on boards restricted to commercially available BST components. It is shown that a high flexibility and low-cost solution to board-level BIST is possible by combining an HDL-based implementation with the wide availability of medium-complexity PLDs.>