The course introduces students to the concept of Reconfigurable FPGA-based Systems, by discussing their overall architecture and companion design flows. The goal is to present to the students the methodological approaches for the design of such systems, showing also real industrial tools, examples and common practices. New application domains demand ever increasing adaptability and performance. In order to cope with changing user requirements, improvements in system features, changing protocol and data-coding standards, and demands for support of a variety of different user applications, many emerging applications in communication, computing and consumer electronics demand that their functionality stays flexible after the system has been manufactured. Reconfigurable Systems-on-a-Chips (SoCs) employing different microprocessor cores and different types of reconfigurable fabrics are one attractive solution for these domains. The increasing prominence of reconfigurable devices within such systems requires HW/SW co-design for SoCs to address the trade-off between software execution and reconfigurable hardware acceleration.
This is the context in which the Xilinx Open Hardware (http://www.openhw.eu/) design contest is organized.The Xilinx Open Hardware, XOHW, is a design contest, at European and Asian level, born in 2015 and promoted by Xilinx, in which the FPGAs are the center of the projects developed by teams of maximum 3 participants. We have been participating as Politecnico di Milano since 2016 and since then we have always been among the finalists and at least one of our teams has been selected as one of the winners. We are the only university which won this competition three times and the only one which won it for at least two years in a row. With this course we want to open to all the Politecnico students the opportunity to participate in this competition, supported by experts in the field and by young people who had already participated and won the XOHW. By doing this we are aiming to create a heterogeneous context where this feature will help the development of innovative ideas to then be implemented in the various projects.

dal February 2019 a June 2019