A successful wrap-up to our 5-day Bootcamp on FPGA Prototyping and Hardware Acceleration!

🎉 From June 22–26, 2026, we had the privilege of organizing a hands-on Bootcamp on FPGA Prototyping and Hardware Acceleration at the I²CS Research Lab-IIIT Kottayam , coordinated by Dr. Minu A Pillai and myself. It was wonderful to see 70+ participants from various institutions across Kerala and Tamil Nadu actively engage in the program. The bootcamp combined theoretical concepts with extensive hands-on training using AMD Xilinx FPGA development boards, providing participants with practical exposure to FPGA-based system design. The program covered a wide range of topics, including: FPGA Architecture, High-Level Synthesis (HLS), AI Accelerators, CNN Implementation on PYNQ-Z2, AI Application Demonstrations on Microchip SoC. A special thanks to PhD scholars Sweety Kunjachan, Prasha Prakash , Remya R, Nitha M Biju -IIITK , Meagan Mathew and my undergraduate students (BTech ECE) Joel Dan Philip , Shravan Narayan Sunil , Johan Mathew John , AMALDEV P G , for conducting the demo and hands-on sessions and providing excellent support throughout the bootcamp. Their enthusiasm and expertise made the program highly interactive and impactful. My sincere gratitude also goes to Dr. Nalesh S for delivering an insightful session on Prototyping Embedded Systems using the Zynq-7000 FPGA and showcasing an engaging live demonstration. Thank you to all the participants for your enthusiasm, curiosity, and active participation. We hope this bootcamp has inspired you to further explore the exciting fields of FPGA design, hardware acceleration, and AI on edge devices. Looking forward to organizing more such programs and fostering a stronger hardware design and embedded AI ecosystem. Chips to Start-up (C2S) Programme I²CS Research Lab-IIIT Kottayam Indian Institute of Information Technology Kottayam