Altera continues support for ECE Sophomore Experience Lab

After donating thousands of support funding in 2016, the Altera Corporation recently gifted another $5,400 to provide all new field programmable gate array (FPGA) development boards to the ECE Sophomore Experience Lab.

Lab director, Greg Chapman, said the company's donation solves “a number of ongoing issues" for students gaining hands-on experience in both ECE 2060 and ECE 2050 classes.

Specific applications of FPGAs include digital signal processing, software-defined radio, ASIC prototyping, medical imaging, computer vision, speech recognition, cryptography, bioinformatics, computer hardware emulation, radio astronomy, metal detection and a growing range of other areas. Another trend of FPGAs is hardware acceleration, using the FPGA to accelerate certain parts of an algorithm and share part of the computation between the FPGA and a generic processor.

Headquartered in Silicon Valley, California, Altera supplies the industry with access to the latest programmable logic, process technologies, IP cores and development tools for more than 30 years. 

Sophomore Experience classes kicked off again in January for the Spring 2018 semester.