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FPGA World 2017 – Report

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FPGA World 2017 – Report

On Thursday September 21th, I went to the FPGA World conference in Copenhagen. While easics is of course always interested in everything concerning FPGAs, the main topic that interested us was the first keynote regarding acceleration of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) using FPGAs. In a previous blogpost I wrote that we’re working on a research project on scalable multimedia implementations. For this we are preparing a demonstrator that runs a CNN on an FPGA. Since we were already up to speed on a more academic level, we thought it would be interesting to hear what the industry has to say about this topic. Enter this conference.

And it was very interesting indeed. The first keynote speaker, Hans Holten-Lund, has ample experience in accelerating CNNs using FPGAs. Many of the trade-offs, mentioned in the keynote, coincided with the boundaries we had met ourselves.

While the other presentations were not focused on CNNs, that did not make them less interesting. From new paradigms in testing to explanations about the next generation of tools, all of the discussed topics were in the wheelhouse of easics.

After the conference, I had a little time to explore the beautiful city of Copenhagen. As a big fan of Scandinavian culture, this was of course a big plus as well.

Joost