Hardware Planning Platform Presented to Dr. Leonid Yavits

Dr. Leonid Yavits’s research group was recently granted a generous donation of equipment to the sum of $35,000 by AMD. Prof. Itamar Levi was the one who suggested that I apply for donation,” shares Dr. Yavits. “All it took was a few emails and an online application. The entire process took about a week, and the contact person was incredibly efficient, forthcoming and kind.”

AMD is a chip and CPU company that also makes FPGAs, GPUs and other VSI products. It has been among Intel’s biggest competitors in the field of CPUs over the past several decades. Around 10 years ago AMD acquired Xilinx, arguably the leading FPGA manufacturer in the world. FPGA is a configurable hardware platform that allows you to program hardware, as opposed to conventional software-programmable CPU whose capabilities in the field of hardware acceleration are quite limited. That’s the equipment that the company donated to Dr. Yavits’s lab – several FPGA cards. “We use them for teaching, undergraduate projects, and postgraduate research,” says Dr. Yavits, “and the donation has already proven fruitful: When I realized just how useful this equipment is, I went ahead and purchased more of their products for my MSc students’ research.”