ARM-Xilinx SoC Lab-in-a-Box One-day Workshop

The University Programs of ARM^® and Xilinx^® recently collaborated to produce an ARM-Xilinx SoC Lab-in-a-Box One-day Workshop based on the freely accessible ARM Cortex®-M0 DesignStart™ Processor for academic use.

The first workshop took place at ARM Cambridge on the 14th and 15th April and attracted over 40 attendees from 29 institutions across the UK and Europe. A similar workshop was also held at FCCM 2014 in Boston, USA on the 11th of May and saw about 40 attendees for the one-day workshop.

Both the Cambridge and Boston workshops were co-presented by the respective ARM and Xilinx University Program teams.

Each one-day workshop commenced with an introduction to the ARM and Xilinx University Programs followed by overviews of DesignStart™, AMBA^® 3 AHB-Lite protocols, the Artix^® -7 FPGA architecture, Keil MDK-ARM Pro tool and Vivado™ Design Flow.

There was plenty of hands-on time for the attendees as well, with lab exercises covering simple AHB peripheral design and integration simulations, integrating UART & memory control peripherals and even the creation of a snake game demo!

The workshops were concluded with the launch of the ARM-Xilinx University Program SoC Lab-in-a-Box. Our newest Lab-in-a-Box contains licenses for the ARM Keil^® MDK Pro development tool, ARM Cortex-M0 DesignStart IP, Digilent Nexys™ 4 FPGA board(s) supported by Xilinx Vivado WebPack and a full suite of academic teaching, lab and lecture materials. If you are interested in adopting this Lab-in-a-Box in your teaching, you can register with the ARM University Program here or request a donation of it directly.

The successful running of these workshops continues our commitment to help educators worldwide master state-of-the-art ARM-and partner based technologies.  Video of the workshops will be posted shortly and we plan to run additional "Professor Workshop" events in Europe, America and Asia during 2014.  Continue to watch this space!