Xilinx XACC Winter school 2021

Xilinx, Inc. is an American semiconductor company that is primarily a supplier of programmable logic devices. The company invented the Field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Yes, you read it correctly, The FPGA ! Considering the rapid growth of FPGAs accelerators in data-centers and various other fields, it is not easy to keep up the pace with the knowledge base of modern FPGAs. These bleeding-edge FPGAs are complex and programming them is a hard-problem. Recently Xilinx was gracious enough to organize a Winter School 2021 primarily for PhD researchers who use FPGA and its tool in their research. It was a 5-day school with technical presentations, talks and a project work. The project work was really interesting as we had to use open-source Vitis libraries for the first time.

Another highlight was the use of above PYNQ board for various designs. Its a great small board which you can use for rapid prototyping many use-cases. I personally look forward to use it as much as I can for small designs.

All in all, a great learning experience !