Altera, Terasic, Impulse, and IEEE Canada Open Student FPGA Competition

Altera, Terasic, Impulse Accelerated Technologies, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Canada announced that sign-ups are open for the 2009 Innovate North America FPGA Competition.

The competition is focused on the use of FPGA technology and CAD-tool software to create advanced computer-system designs.

The design competition is open to all undergraduate and graduate student teams in North America. Teams are required to have an academic sponsor from their university. They will have two months to design their FPGA-based applications using software and development hardware that will be donated by the sponsor companies. Sign-ups are open until Friday, October 30.

Winners will receive a monetary award as well as guaranteed publication of their design in the Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines. Past teams have developed applications for image, audio and signal-processing systems as well as a variety of other applications.

"We were impressed by the broad variety of last year's student projects," said Alfredo Herrera, senior FPGA design and verification engineer and senior IEEE member, Ottawa. "The practicality and innovation of these projects reaffirms my confidence in the talent of the next generation of engineers joining the industry. It bodes well for our common future."

The contest focuses on the flexibility and power of FPGAs and how they enable implementation of entire systems on a single chip. They also can be used as custom module accelerators optimized for specific applications. The participating students will use Altera's Quartus II design software and a Cyclone II-based board from Terasic. Most teams will create their designs in VHDL or Verilog hardware description languages. Impulse C is donating licenses for their CoDeveloper software, which will enable teams to specify their designs in ANSI C code and have it parallelized for multi-stream acceleration in FPGAs.

"We greatly appreciate the range and quality of student submissions that we have seen in previous competitions," said Stephen Brown, director of the University Program for Altera. "Altera is excited about this series of Innovate Design Competitions that are held around the world and very pleased to be able to help students learn more about digital technology."

Impulse CoDeveloper C-to-FPGA development software allows software and hardware engineers to easily develop and retarget C-language applications for FPGAs.

Terasic Technologies is a provider in high-performance hardware and software solutions for FPGA/ASIC prototyping, multimedia and image-processing markets.

Altera offers programmable solutions to system and semiconductor companies.

Students sign up:

http://university.altera.com/innovate/na/

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