As part of our university outreach program, in January 2020 we decided to join the Team Project - a course organized by Wroclaw University of Science and Technology for students of Electronics. The course’s main idea was to help students launch extensive projects that would be practical, usable and interesting from the perspective of the companies cooperating with the University.
Antmicro's projects
In its first year as a participant, Antmicro came up with the following project ideas:
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Build your own open source GPU
The main focus of the project was to provide software support for a custom DMA hardware core in Zephyr - an increasingly popular embedded operating system. We wanted the students to get familiar with the Linux kernel and the process of designing custom drivers for it. We also thought it would be very useful for them to explore the world of the newest embedded technologies and learn the basics of hardware design as well as to get introduced to the Zephyr Real Time Operating System. Importantly, the project would give students the chance to contribute to the open source domain and become a part of the dynamic open source community.
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Design custom voice assistant
The main idea of the project was to design a voice assistant, such as Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, using the TensorFlow framework on an embedded design. Antmicro engineers set out to help students discover the basics of voice recognition and signal processing methods using TensorFlow on embedded designs and to familiarize them with one of the most popular embedded operating systems of the past years - Zephyr. Additionally, the project's idea was to teach students how to integrate hardware with a custom build of an operating system and finally to give them a chance to work on some open source projects and get to know the open source community.
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Open source RISC-V Video processing system
The project’s primary goal was to develop a highly-reconfigurable FPGA Video processing system based on a technology designed in Antmicro. It involved embedded software, digital design with modern hardware description languages and electronics. While working on completing the project, the students would discover the newest technologies used within the company and get familiar with the hardware video processing techniques. The project is based on a ready design, yet students had to convert it to the custom microcontroller built on the FPGA chip using the LiteX SoC Builder. That, in turn, helps them to get familiar with the process of designing custom digital devices using modern hardware description languages. Just like with any other project devised by Antmicro, working on an Open source RISC-V Video processing system gives a chance to contribute to the Open-Source projects and become a part of the Open-Source society.
The main idea behind all the projects was to familiarize the students with open source tools and solutions readily available to help them overcome the problems they can encounter. Additionally, we intended for them to learn the methodologies and workflow used in Silicon Valley and to gain access to the company’s IT & project infrastructure
All the participants are offered the necessary tools, high-end gear and hardware, as well as mentoring and team experience necessary to implement the projects.