The Winners of the 7 Ways to Leave your Spartan-6 FPGA Competition

22 Aug 2022

The Winners of the 7 Ways to Leave your Spartan-6 FPGA Competition

We have completed the 7 Ways to Leave your Spartan-6 FPGA Competition, sponsored by AMD Xilinx. Overall, we had 26 challengers, with 1 unsponsored challenger. Our judges have read all the blogs and scored them. In this blog, we will announce the Grand-Prize, Runner-Up, Third-Prize and Honorable Mention winners.

First Thing First: What is the 7 Ways to Leave Your Spartan-6 FPGA Competition?
The AMD Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA family was introduced in 2009. With current parts shortages, designers are learning how to migrate their designs to the newer Spartan-7 FPGA. The competition was designed to learn more about the Spartan-7 FPGAs and try out some 7 activities, where you earn points to win great prizes by putting a twist on an old song.

The Arty S7 Spartan-7 FPGA Development Board
The Arty S7 is an affordable, ready-to-use development platform designed around the AMD Xilinx Spartan®-7 FPGA family. With the Spartan®-7 devices, the Arty S7 board offers best-in-class performance-per-watt, along with small form-factor packaging to meet the most stringent requirements. With the MicroBlaze Soft Processor Core, you can create embedded applications with a variety of peripherals, memory, and interfaces.

The Arty S7 is supported by AMD Xilinx's Vivado Design Suite, including the free WebPACK version. You can also leverage the Vitis Core Development Kit or Xilinx Software Development Kit to start developing for the MicroBlaze processor with no prior FPGA experience. Tere are two variants of the Arty S7: The Arty S7-25 features the XC7S25-CSGA324, and the Arty S7-50 features the larger XC7S50-CSGA324. Either variant would be acceptable to use for projects in this competition.

Introducing the Winners
The 7 Ways to Leave your Spartan-6 FPGA Competition was an opportunity to learn more about the Spartan-7 FPGAs. Our judges have scored the projects. Let's now meet the winners.

Grand Prize Winner: jure
An element14 member since 2013, jure produced some excellent work in this competition, as well as interesting descriptions of the polarimeter he built. (As the name suggests, a polarimeter is a device used to measure the polarization of light. It's mostly used for scientific experiments, but it can be used in technological applications. For example, it can be used when coupling light to certain optical fibres which are sensitive to light polarization.) He scored very high with his project. Our judge said it best: "This project was always going to be difficult to document, because it is quite large. However, the author has done a good job, the GitGHub repository is looking good. It's an impressive project, it uses MicroBlaze and a fair amount of peripherals, and there is lots of valuable information to be gleaned from the repository." For these reasons jure was selected as the Grand Prize Winner of this challenge. Congratulations to Jure. Link to jure's project blogs.

Runner Up Prize Winner: javagoza
An element14 member since 2019, javagoza has been an active community member with 332 posts overall, and 13 blog entries with 11 different projects for this competition. He produced multiple projects and experiments, but the ArtyBot/EmuBot caught the eyes of our judges. It was a decent project that demonstrates how to use MicroBlaze as well as some basic custom peripherals. He said, "My goal was to regularly do one post a week, eventually there are a few more, there was a lot to learn and document what I had learned about the AMD Xilinx Spartan-7 FPGA and the Vivado ML development toolset." For these reasons javagoza was selected as the Runner-Up Prize Winner of this challenge. Congratulations to javagoza. Link to javagoza's project blogs.

Third-Prize Winner: jancumps
An element14 member since 2013, jancumps is a frequent contributor to element14 as well as one of our community's Top Members. He has published over 3,000 posts overall and 13 blogs for this program. While jancumps joined this competition a little bit later than the other challengers, he cruised full steam ahead, to coin a naval term, and produced an impressive amount of work. It was interesting how jancumps used the introductory blog as a springboard for a unique activity. In his own words, "One of my duties in 7 Ways to Leave Your Spartan-6 is to compare Spartan 6 and 7. My fellow reviewers have already reviewed the reference document's differences and elaborated on them. I'd like to show a difference by porting a Spartan-6 design that uses a primitive that's not available in the Spartan-7. Not a lot of specs comparison, but rewriting a design from an old blog post. In 2017, I wrote XuLA2 FPGA - Up the Clock. It was part of my Spartan-6 learning track. The article shows how to change an external 12 MHz crystal clock input signal into a 264 MHz one, using the Spartan-6 DCM_SP primitive. The Arty S7 board also uses a 12 MHz external clock. A perfect starting point for a migration exercise." His blogs are tutorials and he tests, creates and experiments on migration. For these reasons jancumps was selected as the Third-Prize Winner of this challenge. Congratulations to jancumps. Link to jancump's project blogs.

Honorable Mention: guillengap
An element14 member since 2020, guillengap is a frequent contributor to element14 with 99 posts overall and 8 posts for this competition. guillengap said it best when discussing the differences of the Spartan-6 and Spartan-7 in his opening blog: "Switching between hardware devices doesn't just involve making improvements, or fixing bugs. in this case we are talking about changes in the architecture. This blog will help you to better understand how the new device works and how to take advantage of its best advantages. For example, sometimes we want more speed because we are working with signal or image processing. Other times we want to connect with other hardware devices more easily, to have flexibility in solutions. Even, we must have a basic knowledge to migrate an old code to its new version of software." His projects were interesting and focused on building and experimenting with an automatic sliding door. His step by step discussion of his project is well thought out and organized. He also produced some informative videos that well illustrated what he did. For these reasons guillengap was selected as the Honorable-Mention Winner of this challenge. Congratulations to guillengap. Link to guillengap's project blogs.