The winners of the competition were announced today in Canada by Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR), Terasic Technologies, Impulse Accelerated Technologies Inc. and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). University of Saskatchewan is crowned for Real Time Innovative Sign Language Recognition. The Innovate North America FPGA Competition aims at utilizing FPGA technology and design software to create innovative digital-system designs.
The student teams and their professors were provided with Altera's Quartus® II design software and Terasic’s DE1 board that features a Cyclone® II FPGA, which are powerful tools for creating innovative projects. VHDL or Verilog hardware description languages are used by most of the teams. In McMaster University’s 3D Camera project, Terasic’s DE2 board is combined with two 5 Mega Pixel cameras to form 3D images. Stephen Brown, director of the University Program for Altera, commented: “We were very impressed with the range and quality of student submissions in this year's competition.”
The winners of the 2010 Innovate North America FPGA Competition are:
1st
Place: University of Saskatchewan – Real-time Sign Language Recognition System
2nd
Place: University of South Carolina – FPGA Acceleration of Frequent Itemsets
3rd
Place-tie: Purdue University – Energy-Efficient Digital Camera
3rd
Place-tie: McMaster University – 3D Camera Anaglyph System
Honorable Mention: University of Ottawa – A Bidirectional Human Computer Interface
“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.”
Additional information about the sponsors can be found at www.altera.com
, www.terasic.com.tw
and www.ImpulseC.com
.
The student designs will be made available for download on the University Program section of Altera's website at: www.altera.com/innovate2010 .
