TheComputer Engineering Department held a workshop on the use of field programmable gate array (FPGA) which is used to design control devices and integrated systems. Around 25 participants from computer and electrical engineering specializations were involved in this event which lasted from the 10^th – 13^th of January 2010.

The participants represented several Palestinian universities such as: Birzeit University, Arab American University, Al Quds University and others. In addition to these, the Departments of Computer and Electrical Engineering at An Najah National University represented by Dr. Luai Malhis, Head of the Computer Engineering Department and Dr. Samer Mayaleh from the Electrical Engineering Department participated in the workshop.

The lectures were delivered by Dr. John Debri and Joel Michael Vert from the French university(Paris Sud XI – IUT de Cachan). Dr. Malhis the coordinator of the workshop and Dr. Mayaleh said that the (FPGA) is an integrated circuit which contains an array of identical, logic programmable cells which contain inlets and outlets that are programmed to execute a specific task such as controlling devices and machines. The topics that were discussed in the workshop will be employed in teaching courses at the Computer and Electrical Engineering departments. The participants were trained on programming and using the (FPGA) so that it performs several tasks and operations through forming a number of circuits on a single chip via the schematic design or the (VHDL) programming language. At the end of the workshop, Dr. Malhis and Dr. Mayaleh distributed the certificates among the participants.