Remote laboratory for e-learning of systems on chip and their applications to nuclear and scientific instrumentation

Configuring and setting up a remote access laboratory for an advanced online school on fully programmable System-on-Chip (SoC) proved to be an outstanding challenge. The school, jointly organized by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), focused on SoC and its applications to nuclear and scientific instrumentation and was mainly addressed to physicists, computer scientists and engineers from developing countries. The use of e-learning tools, which some of them adopted and others developed, allowed the school participants to directly access both integrated development environment software and programmable SoC platforms. This facilitated the follow-up of all proposed exercises and the final project. During the four weeks of the training activity, we faced and overcame different technology and communication challenges, whose solutions we describe in detail together with dedicated tools and design methodology. We finally present a summary of the gained experience and an assessment of the results we achieved, addressed to those who foresee to organize similar initiatives using e-learning for advanced training with remote access to SoC platforms.