Tomorrow's Innovation Today

Inspiration comes from everywhere, and now there is an incredible opportunity to be part of the future. Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are changing the landscape of design, and now you can unleash your creativity and join the Innovation FPGA Design Contest. The contest allows participants to leverage the flexibility of easy-to-use Intel® Cyclone® FPGAs. With their ability to boost performance, expand I/O, and adapt to changes, FPGAs have become the mainstream in embedded design.

Entering is easy. All you need to do is visit http://www.innovatefpga.com/portal/index.html, register, and submit your idea by December 31, 2017. The community will then vote on their favorite submissions, and by January 31 the regional semi-finalists will be announced. The 100 top submissions in each region will get a Terasic DE10-Nano kit to start creating their design. Those top regional submissions have until April 30, 2018 to create and submit their paper design and video. Then by May 31, 2018 the regional finalists will be announced. Those regional finalists will have their submissions graded by a group of judges and the Grand Finalists will be announced on July 15, 2018. The Grand Finalists from all regions will be invited to a special event in August 2018 to present their submission and find out which submission is the overall winner. Besides the 100 boards for the top regional submissions, over $30,000 total in cash and prizes are available including an all-expense paid trip to San Jose, California, for the Grand Final!

As if the board wasn’t enough. With over 400 Terasic DE10-Nano kits for the top submissions, this contest is really worth entering. The Terasic DE10-Nano Development Kit, based on an Intel® Cyclone® FPGA, provides a reconfigurable hardware design platform for makers, educators, and IoT system developers. The kit contains a board that features two general purpose input/output (GPIO) expansion headers and an Arduino* header so you can connect to a wide range of sensors.

Some of the Terasic DE10-Nano Kits key features include:

• Intel Cyclone® V SE FPGA with integrated 800 MHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor
• 1 GB DDR3 SDRAM (32-bit data bus)
• Gigabit Ethernet PHY with RJ45 connector
• USB OTG port, USB micro-AB connector
• Micro SD card socket
• Three 50 MHz clock sources from the clock generator
• HDMI TX, compatible with DVI 1.0 and HDCP v1.4
• A/D converter, 4-pin SPI with FPGA
• Two push-buttons
• Four slide switches
• Eight green user LEDs
• Two 40-pin expansion headers
• One Arduino expansion header (Uno R3 compatibility), can be connected with Arduino shields
• One 10-pin Analog input expansion header (shared with Arduino Analog input)
• Accelerometer (I²C interface + interrupt)
• UART to USB, USB Mini-B connector

Participating in contests can sometimes be a challenge. Your time is valuable, so it is important to apply your cycles diligently. Once in a while a contest comes along where the technology is leading-edge and the prizes are robust enough where participating not only makes sense, it also fuels your creativity and desire to grow. The Innovate FPGA contest from Terasic, Intel®, and DigiKey not only will help spark your passion but also provide an ideal platform to help your thoughts come to life.