We are back: we are happy to announce the return of this competition. This FPGA Programming Competition made possible thanks to the sponsorship of Altera, Impulse Accelerated Technologies  and Terasic Technologies and the leadership of the Ottawa section of the IEEE. But please note that this website will be decommissioned in favor of a new website: http://university.altera.com/innovate/na

                       ALL DETAILS AVAILABLE AT: http://university.altera.com/innovate/na/

Who Can Participate?:

Innovate North-America is open to undergraduate and masters students enrolled in a Canadian or American college or university. Knowledge of Verilog/VHDL/C is desirable and recommended but not required to participate, but knowledge of digital design or computer/system architecture is key.
The spirit of this competition is to provide a venue for students to gain practical experience in implementing an innovative under some of the constrains and conditions they will face in industry. An abstract of the winner's work will be published in one of the IEEE publication; for example, an article about the 2008 winner's appeared in the summer publication of the IEEE Canadian Review.

How Does It Work?: 

Innovate North-America brings together Canadian and American students and mentors from academia to a learning environment encouraging innovation. Each team must have a mentor from the institution they are enrolled in, and in some cases they may chose a mentor from industry. Each team should also have at least one member knowledgeable in digital design or computer/system architecture. FPGA design experience is desirable but not required.

Design projects will be judged on their innovation, quality of final report, completeness, practicality and complexity; the most important factor being innovation and quality of final report. Teams with masters students will have their score handicaped to make it fair for undergrad student. Points will be awarded to teams showing their designs running on the evaluation board provided.

Finalist will be published in the IEEE FCCM 2010 pulication.

Automatic Object Recognition Algorithm by University of Toronto Team Wins Altera/IEEE/Impulse Innovate Canada Competition

University teams develop innovative solutions for image processing, medical electronics and embedded control

Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR), IEEE Canada and Impulse Accelerated Technologies would like to announce the winners of the 2008 Innovate Canada Programming competition. This competition provided student teams with leading edge Altera FPGA based development boards, FPGA design tools from Altera and C-to-FPGA tools from Impulse, and engineering support from both companies in their efforts to develop commercially useful and innovative applications.

The university design teams took advantage of embedded processors and a variety of custom FPGA hardware modules and combined hardware and software co-design methods to create single-board embedded systems. Co-design tools and methods allow system designers to experiment with design resource allocation trade-offs, and more rapidly partition applications between embedded processors and custom FPGA co-processors. This approach, known as system-on-programmable-chip, offers the cost benefit of single-chip integration, as well as providing the potential for significant performance improvements over software-only embedded solutions. Tools such as Impulse CoDeveloper and Altera SOPC Builder enable rapid development and optimization of these types of mixed software/hardware applications.

First prize went to a team mentored by Dr. Gregory Steffan at the University of Toronto. Team members Martin Labrecque, Muttee Sheikh, Jill San Luis, Benzakhar Manashirov and Mohammed Elsayed created an FPGA-based object recognition project that included a number of complex hardware filters as well as software running on an embedded NIOS 2 processor. Second prize went to an Ottawa University team Mentored by Dr. Miodrag Bolic. Team members Daniel Shapiro, Vishal Thareja, Saurabh Ratti, Srivatsan Vijayakumar and Muran Yang created an automatic fuzzy logic generator, including compiler extensions, that enhances the instruction set of the open-source LEON embedded processor. Third place was a tie; a Carleton University team, composed of Trevor Burton and Geoffrey Green and again Mentored by Dr. Miodrag Bolic, created a hardware implementation of a wavelet‐based image compression algorithm. Also tied for third place was the University of Saskatchewan team mentored by Dr. Eric Salt. Team members Geoff Baker, Shea Pederson, Adrien Rudulier, Nathan Windels and Brett Baerg created a hardware system for Ethernet transmission of MPEG stream from standard composite (yellow RCA) NTSC. Honorable mention also went to the Carleton University team mentored by Dr. Adrian Chan and Dr. Sreeraman Rajan. This team, composed of students Daanish Khan and Dragan Trifkovic, created a heart rate estimator using phonocardiogram (PCG) signals to automate unattended unobtrusive heart rate estimation.

Innovate Canada is just the latest in a series of academic competitions sponsored by Altera, and the first in which Impulse has participated as a sponsor.