Xilinx Kicks Off Conference With New Tech

Xilinx has unveiled new solutions and IP for its growing software, AI and hardware developer communities at the first week of Xilinx Adapt 2021, the company’s virtual technology conference. Week one is focused on software and hardware developers, with highlights including a complete software stack for intelligent video analytics applications and an expanded video and imaging IP portfolio for its UltraScale+^™ and Versal^™ devices.

“The first week of Xilinx Adapt is designed to educate new, as well as advanced developers on the latest development environments and resources available to more easily build applications on Xilinx^® platforms”, said Ramine Roane, vice president of marketing, AI and Software, Xilinx.

“We are committed to helping the developer community accelerate applications on adaptive hardware, to propel the industry forward and have a positive impact on people’s lives. We are making programming of adaptive platforms more accessible to all developers, by interfacing to popular domain-specific and more generic open-source development frameworks”.

This week involves new intelligent video analytics applications from the Vitis^™ Video Analytics SDK, a video analytics software development kit providing a complete software stack for intelligent video analytics applications on Xilinx platforms, deployed edge-to-cloud. The end-to-end video analytics solution enables video decoding, pre-processing, AI inference, tracking and post-processing for whole application acceleration.

Vitis Video SDK provides the foundational layer for video analytic applications such as understanding vehicle and pedestrian traffic patterns in smart cities, health and safety monitoring in hospitals, self-checkout and analytics in retail, and detecting component defects at manufacturing facilities. In addition, it provides a framework for developers to create their own innovations with generic infrastructure plugins, software acceleration libraries, and an interface to develop a custom acceleration library to control a custom hardware accelerator.

Xilinx has expanded its video and imaging IP portfolio for UltraScale+^™ and Versal^™ devices by enabling higher-quality 8K video capture and 8K display with the industry’s first HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort (DP) 1.4 with UltraScale+ and Versal products. Combining HDMI 2.1 or DP 1.4 with its 8K scaler and mixer IPs allows customers to build a complete, end-to-end 8K video pipeline.

Xilinx is also announcing the availability of improved Vitis Vision libraries used by developers across automotive, industrial machine vision and smart camera applications, which includes Image Signal Processing (ISP) with HDR and pre-and post-processing functions for machine learning (ML) neural networks with the OpenCV API.

Hackster.io will again be conducting its Adaptive Computing Challenge design contest with Xilinx. As part of the expanded contest, now in its second year, Hackster will award $70,000 in total prize money to 15 winners as well as over 350 boards in prizes. Contestants in the 2021 Challenge will compete in three categories: edge computing, data centre AI and big data analytics, which includes early access to a new big data analytics developer board for big data and associated applications. The top prize in each category is $10,000.

In addition, the Xilinx University Program is sponsoring the Adaptive Computing Challenge for submissions from college students for projects in each of the three categories for an additional $2,500 award. To further support diversity in the technology space, Xilinx is also sponsoring a new Women in Technology award with a cash prize of $2,500. Teams composed of at least 50 per cent women are eligible to submit their project for this additional award, alongside their edge computing, data centre AI and big data analytics submissions.

The final three days next week will focus on the company’s broad end-market segments, with dedicated sessions covering aerospace and defence, automotive, data centre, industrial, medical, and wired and wireless businesses.

You can find more information about Xilinx and Adapt 2021 on its website.

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