University of Saskatchewan Wins 2010 Innovate North America FPGA Competition

OTTAWA, Ontario, July 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Altera Corporation (Nasdaq: ALTR), Terasic Technologies, Impulse Accelerated Technologies Inc. and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) today announced the winners of the 2010 Innovate North America FPGA Competition. The competition is focused on the use of FPGA technology and design software to create innovative digital-system designs.

To assist with their design efforts the student teams and their professors were provided with Altera's Quartus® II design software and a board from Terasic that features a Cyclone® II FPGA, which they used to produce innovative, functional projects. Most teams created their designs in VHDL or Verilog hardware description languages. Impulse C donated licenses for their CoDeveloper software, which enabled teams to specify their designs in ANSI C code and have it parallelized for multi-stream acceleration in FPGAs.

The winners of the 2010 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
• Honorable Mention: University of Ottawa – A Bidirectional Human Computer Interface

"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."

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.  

About Altera

Altera® programmable solutions enable system and semiconductor companies to rapidly and cost-effectively innovate, differentiate and win in their markets. Find out more about Altera's FPGA, CPLD and ASIC devices at www.altera.com. To subscribe to Altera's RSS/XML news feeds, visit Altera RSS Feeds.

About Impulse

Impulse CoDeveloper C-to-FPGA development software allows software and hardware engineers to easily develop and retarget C-language applications for FPGAs. Using the Impulse tools, applications developers can quickly analyze, parallelize and partition code for optimal performance. Find out more at www.ImpulseC.com.

About Terasic Technologies

Terasic Technologies is the leading provider in high-performance hardware and software solutions for FPGA/ASIC prototyping multimedia and image-processing markets. Altera's ACAP design service and training partner, also assists universities in Taiwan in organizing and establishing Altera Joint Labs, and provides technical support to professors and students. Find out more at www.terasic.com.tw.

Altera, the Altera logo, and all other words that are identified as trademarks are, unless noted otherwise, Registered, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and the trademarks of Altera Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. All other product or service names are the property of their respective holders.

SOURCE Altera Corporation