Kurt WickKurt Wick, Senior Scientist, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota, B.S. 1986, M.A. 1989, University of Minnesota. Together with faculty, he has been developing and teaching the Methods of Experimental Physics lab at the Universityof Minnesota for the last 28 years. He has always have been interested in the electronics and computer interfacing aspect of the course. About 10 years ago they included FPGAs in the lab course. The reasoning was that, first, the old 74 series chips were rarely being used anymore in the real world; second, just when the digital circuits began to get interesting for students, i.e., as the size and speed of the design increases, the circuits became extremely tedious and difficult to construct on a bread board. What he immediately liked about the FPGAs was that it freed them from these two constraints while still being able to teach the fundamental aspects of digital logic. Students now can expand their knowledge and apply it to more challenging and rewarding designs that are also in sync with current technologies. Read More Read Less