Date: 15/07/2010

University of Saskatchewan wins Innovate North America FPGA competition

Altera, Terasic , Impulse and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) declared University of Saskatchewan as the winners of the 2010 Innovate North America FPGA competition for developing a real-time sign language recognition system. University of South Carolina bagged the second place for their project on FPGA Acceleration of Frequent Itemsets while the third place was shared by Purdue University for Energy-Efficient Digital Camera and McMaster University for 3D Camera. University of Ottawa got the honorable mention to produce a Bidirectional Human Computer Interface.

The competition is focused on the use of FPGA technology and design software to create innovative digital-system designs. The student team and their professors were provided with Altera's Quartus II design software and a board from Terasic that features a Cyclone II FPGA that could be used in their projects. Most teams participating created their designs in VHDL or Verilog. Impulse C donated licenses for their CoDeveloper software thus enabling teams to specify their designs in ANSI C code and have it parallelized for multi-stream acceleration in FPGAs.

"We were very impressed with the range and quality of student submissions in this year's competition," said Stephen Brown, director of the University Program for Altera. "Altera offers Innovate design contests each year in various regions and is pleased to play a role in helping students to learn more about digital technology."

"This year's projects were outstanding and provided the participants with an invaluable experience," stated Alfredo Herrera, planning committee chairman and senior IEEE member, Ottawa. "Teams introduced some very unique ways of solving known problems. Having them execute these solutions using economical, powerful, industry-standard tools leaves a legacy of known good code that can be reused by industry."