Eric Bogatin's Blog: What I Learned This Month

In addition to social networking, the web has enabled and revolutionized open sourced activities.

Linux started its life as an open source operating system, and has evolved into dozens of variations like Ubuntu. Wikipedia is now a top rated, open source information reference. Even astronomy and astrophysics research has entered the open sourced arena with the Galaxy Zoo project.

As an example of “online introspection,” Wikipedia states, “A main principle and practice of open source software development is peer production by bartering and collaboration, with the end-product (and source-material) available at no cost to the public.”

This is exactly the principle behind the FPGA Camp, an example of an open source conference. Vikash Rungta, a principle organizer, offered his motivation for the conference: “I love FPGAs and I wanted to get other FPGA people together to talk about FPGAs.” FPGAs, of course, stands for Field Programmable Gate Arrays.

Vikash has worked with FPGAs for more than 12 years, at start ups, at Cisco and now most recently at Infinera Corp. He sees FPGAs as sometimes an orphan topic at conferences like DAC and IEEE programs.  He wanted to attend a conference that focused just on FPGAs. When he couldn’t find one, he started one of his own.

His idea is to have an evening gathering once a quarter, free to all attendees, with highly rated speakers, food and refreshments and lots of opportunity to mingle, network and talk shop with other FPGA designers.

Amolok Badesha, an application engineer with Agilent Technologies, was one of the organizers of the first event, held on Aug 26, 2009. He and Vikash put the whole evening program together in less than two weeks just talking to friends. They arranged a room at Juniper Networks, asked a few vendors to pay for food and invited six experts to speak.

Salman Jiva of Altera, Steve Weir of Teraspeed and Marty Jain from Lattice were some of the speakers at the first event. This “Camp” focused on High Speed Serial Interfaces: Protocols, IPs and Devices. Once word got out to the design community, the free conference was quickly booked to capacity with 140 engineers.

The next event was held on Nov 11, 2009 at the Agilent Technologies auditorium. A dozen vendors had table-top booths and more than 150 engineers attended. I was one of the speakers and talked about “How the board will screw up your beautiful transceiver signals, and what you can do about it.”

A copy of the handouts of my talk can be downloaded from beTheSignal.com, and subscribers can view a recording of my lecture. You can catch an interview I gave Vikash which is posted on the FPGA Camp web site and on Youtube.

Vikash’s plan is to conduct these open source, low overhead, free conferences once a quarter. The organizers are all volunteers, the facilities are donated, the speakers do it for the opportunity to share and the vendors pay for the food and refreshments.

Where does the energy come from that drives these sorts of open source events? As Vikash says, “I do it for the passion. I love all things about FPGAs.” He sounds like an FPGA evangelist.