element14.com, an online engineering community, has announced the graduation of the charter class of engineers in its Path to Programmable training program. The program, sponsored by Avnet and Xilinx is designed to accelerate the adoption of programmable logic devices in electronic hardware design.

The training program enrolled five community members and trained them on FPGA/SoC technology to speed up their understanding of the technology, development tools and design flow process. FPGA/SoCs are key to delivering smart, connected systems suitable for a wide variety of cutting edge applications, spanning aerospace and defense, automotive, data center, high performance computing, industrial IOT, medical, and 5G wireless.

The engineers received mentoring from experts at the element14 Community and the engineering teams at Avnet and Xilinx. Support included element14 Essentials learning modules on Programmable Logic and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The engineers were also given an Avnet MiniZed, a single-core Zynq 7Z007S development board designed for entry-level Zynq SoC developers. The program concluded with the engineer-trainees building a project of their choice using the skills they acquired during the training.

Dianne Kibbey, Global Head of Community and Social Media for the element14 Community said: “The growth in the use of programmable logic devices such as FPGAs in drones, wireless networks, data centers, IoT and ADAS vehicles makes this training both timely and critical for the development of the next generation of engineers. This new program from the element14 Community provided our members with a great opportunity for professional development and helped them accelerate their technology adoption of designing hardware controlled by FPGAs/SoCs."

Dianne added, “We are already planning for a further intake of engineers into the program, with the intent of helping more and more engineers understand how simple FPGAs can be.”

“It’s been really exciting following the progress of the participants, and exciting to see a new group of users learn Xilinx technology,” said Jayson Bethurem, product line manager at Xilinx. “Interest in FPGAs has been increasing at an exponential rate, and we’re proud to partner with a community like element14 to bring educational content on programmable logic devices, like the Zynq-7000 SoCs, to more people than ever.”

The element14 Community was the first community specifically built for engineers and now has over 650,000 engineer, maker and entrepreneurial members. The Path to Programmable program was developed following feedback from the members themselves, aimed to help engineers quickly adopt programmable logic device technology and to address any misconceptions they have about the difficulty of working with them.

Xilinx products are available from Newark in North America, Farnell in Europe and element14 in APAC.