Digilent’s and CNFM’s Basys 3 Workshop in Paris a Success

I am excited to share my experience with the first workshop Digilent held  in partnership with Coordination Nationale pour la Formation en Microélectronique (CNFM) France at Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris in June.

At the beginning of the workshop, Professor Thierry Gil introduced CNFM as a Digilent academic partner and mentioned our collaboration with Xilinx XUP and the Digilent’s EU distribution partner from Germany, Trenz Electronic, in the program “One Board, One Student.” This initiative makes it easier for students at  French universities to use Digilent tools in the classroom. If you want more details about the program, see the April blog post!

I had the opportunity to share the latest information about how Digilent seeks to fulfill its mission of offering hand-on learning experience by working together with our partners to make a difference in a technologically dominated world. Participants were particularly interested in the latest products I showcased, including the Nexys Video, the Nexys 4 DDR,the ZYBO, the NetFPGA-SUME, and many others.

Mircea Dabacan, a professor at Technical University of Cluj-Napoca in Romania and the general manager of the Romanian branch of Digilent, guided the participants, professors from six universities from France, through the labs for Digilent Basys 3 board  and Vivado Software. He started from the Xilinx  workshop material in Verilog and translated into VHDL and from Vivado 2014.2 to Vivado 2014.4.  The materials are available at https://cloud.digilentinc.com/Share/CNFM+Basys+3+Workshop+Materials.zip.

We introduced the Vivado Design Flow using a simple example. For one of the labs, Mircea used the Analog Discovery to visualize the output signals from the Basys 3 FPGA using a Pmod TPH and Pmod DA1.

It was an intensive, long day full of useful hands-on applications and the attendees were excited to complete all the labs in the workshop even though we exceeded the allocated time.

After the workshop, I was pleased to find out that some of the professors decided to incorporate the Basys 3 and Vivado into their curricula for next year. This is made more feasible thanks to the amazing collaboration with CNFM through the “One Board, One Student” program.

Digilent and CNFM will be organizing such events in the future, so keep posted to find out more details.

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