Winners Announced: We're Giving Away Up to 10 Arty-S7 Boards to Use in an Upcoming Xilinx Workshop!

tariq.ahmad Hi Tariq,

Could you please tell when will be the board winners announced and boards shipped? Just curious since we are pretty close to the start date of the event.

This is really great! I'm definitely going to attend this workshop.

Working on quite a number of industrial as well as hobby projects, FPGA is something I haven't tried out yet but always sounded very powerful, fascinating, and complex at the same time. Also, I didn't get any professional opportunities and personal motivation to try out these myself yet.

I think this workshop would walk me through that difficult process of starting out randomly and save me a lot of hours of internet research myself. Who knows I found it super-exciting to use in my next project if I overcome my initial resistance

Thanks You Guys: Element14, Xilinx .. for arranging it

Hmm I mean this is actually not an Arduino board, it's a FPGA board. If you want to learn about Arduino this is overkill, an Arduino UNO would be better for you.

I really want to learn about Arduino... tutorial

One of the best board for simple signal processing algorithm implementation.

I'm a Lead Firmware Engineer with over 25 years of experience. I have to work with FPGA developers on a regular basis. I think I would be able to be a better engineer if I was able to win one of the development boards for the upcoming classes, so I can take the class. It will help me do a better job at evaluating and selecting new hardware and software solutions for new products and help my coworkers doing the primary FPGA  development work. I have worked often in small companies and startups where learning FPGA development skills would also allow me to contribute.

Thanks.

It's really nice that we are getting a chance to win an arty-s7.

Though, I am not experienced in FPGA development, in fact I came to know about FPGAs through this community only but I think they are really exciting.

I think this series will provide a good foundation for starting FPGA development. Since arty-s7 is best suited for beginners, I think it is the best choice for starting FPGA development.

I have also watched the 'vivado series by Adam Taylor' but since I didn't have any board, I couldn't do hands on practice.

I think if I am able to get the board, then first I will watch that series again and then do hands on practice and then join this series.

I am also interested in comparing its performance with other boards like aurdino and raspberry pi, this way I will be able to see which one is better in what task myself.

Thanks!

I am interested on participating in the workshop on Arty-S7. Thanks.

I am very interested in Spartan-7 devices and thinking about using it for high-volume products in the future. Thus I registered for this workshop and would like to have an Arty S7 board to facilitate my learning.

Product design based on FPGA has lots of advantages over traditional mircoprocessor based desig. First of all, FPGA is reprogrammable at hardware level so we can quickly prototype a new product. Unlike tradition design, FPGA design is not pre-designed circuitry for a specific application. In other words, the reconfigurability of FPGA greatly shortens the time-to-maket. In addition, even we made mistakes in our FPGA design, it won't as costly as traditional design. We don't need to go through the design cycle of redesigning the circuit, layouting the PCB, waiting for the PCB manufacture and assembly. Instead, we only need change the HDL code and reconfigure FPGA devices. Performance wise, FPGA is very good at parallelized computation such as DSP, sensor fusion and AI. Thus it's very promising for edge AI applications.

However, FPGA does have a couple of disadvantages preventing its wide use for high-volume products. High price tag and high power consumption are two major concerns for me. Xilinx claims "Spartan-7 FPGAs provide power savings in excess of 50% over previous-generation devices, while increasing the logic and I/O performance demanded by cost-sensitive applications". Thus I really want to know more about this device and see if it's feasible for high-volume edge AI products such as facial recognition and voice recognition based security products.

I am looking into creating a custom SoC (microcontroller) with a few peripherals which aren't common in the offerings of the microcontroller vendors.

An example would be to have a sort of image acquisition SoC that would perform all the computation hard work and then exchange information with a normal microcontroller over SPI or other popular interface.

The FPGA SoC can run image processing algorithms (e.g. facial recognition) and then provide only the results to a common microcontroller over SPI or UART.