Altera, Terasic and Impulse Donate Equipment to Innovate North America FPGA Competition
Ottawa, Canada, October 5, 2009—Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR), Terasic Incorporated, Impulse Accelerated Technologies Inc. and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Canada today 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 innovative 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, 2009.
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 (www.fccm.org). 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,” stated 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 Corporation. “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.”
Students can sign up at http://university.altera.com/innovate/na/. Questions can be e-mailed to innovate-na@altera.com. The organizers would like to thank the IEEE for holding true to their mission of fostering technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity.
About Impulse
Impulse CoDeveloper C-to-FPGA development software allows software and hardware engineers to easily develop and retarget C-language applications for FPGAs. Using the Impulse tools, applications developers can quickly analyze, parallelize and partition code for optimal performance. Find out more at www.ImpulseC.com.
About Terasic Technologies
Terasic Technologies is the leading provider in high-performance hardware and software solutions for FPGA/ASIC prototyping, multimedia and image-processing markets. An Altera ACAP design service and training partner, Terasic also assists universities in Taiwan in organizing and establishing Altera Joint Labs, and provides technical support to professors and students. Find out more at http://www.terasic.com.tw/.
About Altera
Altera® programmable solutions enable system and semiconductor companies to rapidly and cost-effectively innovate, differentiate and win in their markets. Find out more about Altera's FPGA, CPLD and ASIC devices at www.altera.com. To subscribe to Altera's RSS/XML news feeds, visit Altera RSS Feeds.
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