Highlights from the Verilog Meetup in Mexico and planned hackathon in Armenia

[Yuri Panchul]

Some highlights from the Verilog Meetup workshop we did at Universidad autónoma de Baja California in Tijuana last week. There will be a similar event in Armenia in two weeks. If you are interested in a similar event at your school, university or hackspace, please let me know.

* The participating students were familiar with the logic gates and flip-flops but had no prior experience with the hardware description languages. After 1 1/2 days they were able to code combinational and sequential logic to recognize keystrokes and drive LEDs, 7-segment display and moving color pictures on LCD screen.

* On the second day we were joined by Scott Casper @casperscott from Gowin Semiconductor and Victor Torres @victor-torres-14678722a from Harper & Two, a distributor of Gowin. Scott and Victor addressed the students. Victor addressed the students in Spanish because he is from the area, he was studying at Universidad Iberoamericana Tijuana and worked at Samsung Optoelectronics Tijuana (apparently Tijuana is a major manufacturing center for electronic companies).

* We at Verilog Meetup support ~40 FPGA boards with Xilinx, Altera, Gowin and Lattice FPGA, but for such seminars we prefer Gowin because of the speed of synthesis, low cost and use of LCD instead of HDMI or VGA. Gowin is also the only FPGA vendor that offers tools running on Mac with Apple Silicon popular among students.

* At the end we reviewed the code of a simple graphical game and I explained how to move the code from FPGA to ASIC using Tiny Tapeout infrastructure.

* We plan more such events both in the United States and Latin America, as well as in the regions of the Caucasus and Central Asia. In addition to introductory workshops we also promote exercises that prepare the students for internships in electronic companies.

For more details - https://verilog-meetup.com/2025/02/26/uabc-tijuana-mexico-workshop/

Thank you,

Yuri Panchul