IEEE University of Toronto Student Branch

FPGA accelerators are the trend for next-generation computing. If you want to show-off your exceptional programming skills and your creativity, and even change the world, participate in Innovate Canada FPGA Programming Competition! This event is sponsored by Altera, Impulse and IEEE.

You have to come up with an innovative idea to develop applications on Altera FPGAs. Examples include medical imaging, financial modeling and face recognition. The deadline to submit your proposal is January 25, 2008. Once your proposal is accepted, you will receive educational material, development software from Altera and Impulse, and a DE1 Altera Development kit to keep.

Thanks to Impulse, you don't have to be a HDL (Hardware Description Language) expert to win. The Impulse software is able to convert your code in C into HDL, with optimization in parallelization and pipelining.

Who Can Participate?:

Innovate Canada is open to undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in a Canadian college or university. Knowledge of digital design, Verilog/VHDL/C is desirable but not required to participate.

The spirit of this competition is to provide a venue for students new to industry to gain practical experience and exposure to industry, while they contribute their ideas towards pushing this technology forward. Continuing education students are welcome to participate within the constraints of this intent. Specifically, experienced engineers that have returned to school for continuing education are ineligible for prizes, but may receive tools and support and submit designs. Their working applications will be published.

How Does It Work?:

Teams participating are required to have member(s) knowledgeable in digital design, programming and computer/system architecture. Teams will also be required have a mentor from the educational institution where they are enrolled, or from industry. FPGA design experience is desirable but not required.

Design projects will be judged on their completeness, quality of execution, market value and innovation. IEEE FPGA Workshop was a good event to start with. Those who missed it, the event took place in Ottawa on October 16 and 17, more information at: http://ottawa.ieee.ca/ems/fpgaworkshop/

For more information, please consult:

1. http://www.innovatecanada.ca/
2. http://ieee.toronto.edu/drupal/files/InnovateCanada_poster_bilingual.pdf
3. http://ieee.toronto.edu/drupal/files/IEEE_Ottawa_FPGA_programming_competition.pdf