Farnell joins with Xilinx to help FPGA engineers

Building on the success of last year’s successful training series, Path II Programmable will once again provide five community members with guidance and advice from knowledgeable community members and product specialists from Xilinx and Avnet as they journey to become FPGA design engineers.

Over the course of six weeks, the participants will blog about their journey to share their knowledge and development experience with fellow community members.

Path II Programmable leverages the Avnet Ultra96-V2 development board, an Arm-based, Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC open source board to develop software applications, hardware devices and kernel programming for operating systems.

By using programmable logic to accelerate the development of deep learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms, the low-cost Avnet Ultra96-V2 makes the power of programmable logic accessible for all types of engineers, enabling software developers to take advantage of the benefits of hardware acceleration.

“Our Path to Programmable initiative provides members with a unique opportunity for professional development while continuing to address misconceptions around the complexity of developing products with programmable logic devices,” said Dianne Kibbey, Global Head of Community and Social Media for the element14 Community. “The element14 Community is committed to supporting its members as they build projects, develop their skills and stay up to date with the latest technologies. And by using the Ultra96-V2 to complete their projects, participants will gain valuable experience for future development of AI and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.”

Through the Path II Programmable program, participants will receive the tools they need to develop smart, connected systems suitable for a wide variety of applications, including:

• Artificial Intelligence 
• Machine Learning
• IoT/Cloud Connectivity for Add-On Sensors
• Embedded Computing
• Robotics
• Entry Level Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC Development Environment
• Training Prototyping and Proof of Concept Demo Platform
• Wireless Design and Demonstrations Using WiFi and Bluetooth

“This program gives designers the skills they need to take advantage of increasingly popular of FPGAs, while leveraging the easy to use Ultra96-V2 board to accelerate software development,” said Jayson Bethurem, product line manager at Xilinx. “We are delighted to run this program with the element14 Community again this year.”