Altera, Terasic, Impulse Accelerated and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Canada announced that sign-ups are open for the 2009 Innovate North America FPGA Competition. The competition is focused on the use of FPGA technology and CAD-tool software to create innovative computer-system designs. The design competition is open to all undergraduate and graduate student teams in North America. Teams are required to have an academic sponsor from their university. They will have two months to design their FPGA-based applications using software and development hardware that will be donated by the sponsor companies.

Sign-ups are open until Friday, October 30, 2009. Winners will receive a monetary award as well as guaranteed publication of their design in the Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (www.fccm.org). Past teams have developed applications for image, audio and signal-processing systems as well as a variety of other applications. The contest focuses on the flexibility and power of FPGAs and how they enable implementation of entire systems on a single chip. They also can be used as custom module accelerators optimized for specific applications.

The participating students will use Altera's Quartus® II design software and a Cyclone® II-based board from Terasic. Most teams will create their designs in VHDL or Verilog hardware description languages. Impulse C is donating licenses for their CoDeveloper software, which will enable teams to specify their designs in ANSI C code and have it parallelized for multi-stream acceleration in FPGAs.