Designs to solve real world problems using Xilinx’s Vitis development environment and Vitis AI are sought in a competition organised by Xilinx in partnership with Hackster.io.

There is a Startup Design contest and an Independent Developer contest, all based on designs using Vitis / Vitis AI to create a new application designed to show hardware acceleration with programmable logic. Open source submission is required through Hackster.io.

Technology startups, early stage technology companies and research institutions can enter the startup competition and will need to demonstrate application acceleration with programmable logic, that “shows significant performance boost or total cost of ownership (TCO) advantages vs CPU / GPU / ASICs” says the company.

The three categories are Intelligent Video Analytics, where submissions are required to use Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC ZCU104 Evaluation Kit combined with Xilinx Vitis / Vitis AI to build an intelligent video analytics solution, “including but not limited to smart city, smart retail, ADAS, robotics vision, medical imaging and many other applications”.

The second category is Adaptable Compute Acceleration. Here entries use an Alveo U50 Accelerator Card, combined with Vitis / Vitis AI to implement hardware acceleration, “including but not limited to financial computing, machine learning, computational storage, and data search and analytics”.

The third category is Adaptive Intelligence of Things. Applications should use an Avnet Ultra96-V2 Development Board, combined with Vitis / Vitis AI “to build any application that shows the best use of hardware acceleration with programmable logic”.

Registration for the startup competition closes on Friday 14 August and the hardware application for the independent developer contest is also due on Friday 14 August, Loaner boards for independent developers will be shipped from 19 August and submissions will close on 15 November 2020 and winners announced the following month. For the startups contest, submissions close 15 January with winners announced in February 2021. The startup contest attracts large cash prizes of $100,000 for the winner, $50,000 for the second prize and $30,000 for the third place winner.