ENTC Team Wins the RISC-V based Design & Verification Challenge at DVCon
Team BitWeavers from the Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering of the University of Moratuwa was able to become the winner of the global design contest “C-DAC’s VEGA microprocessor (RISC-V) based Design & Verification Challenge” organized by the DVCon India 2024 Design and Verification Conference. The team consists of Supun Dasantha Kuruppu, Anuki Pasqual, and Dakshina Tharindu from the Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering.
This contest for university students aimed to encourage innovation in digital system design and verification. Over the span of 5 months, the teams were required to design, verify, and implement a custom AI accelerator to accelerate a vision transformer model for a malware detection application. The accelerator would then be interfaced with the VEGA AS1061 CPU indigenously developed by C-DAC (Center for Development of Advanced Computing, India) and implemented on a Genesys 2 FPGA board. The contest was divided into 3 stages, with 20 teams out of 120 being selected for Stage 2A and 9 teams being selected for Stage 2B.
Team BitWeavers comprising Anuki Pasqual, Dakshina Tharindu, and Supun Kuruppu was able to successfully implement and run the full system and achieve an overall 3x reduction in inference latency compared to the pure CPU execution, surpassing the performance of all other teams. They were the only team from Sri Lanka to reach the top 3 and were given the opportunity to attend the DVCon India 2024 conference held in Bangalore, India on the 18th and 19th of September 2024 and demonstrate their accelerator. They received praise from both the organizing committee and the audience for their impressive performance.
The Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering has always been a pioneer in electronics innovation in Sri Lanka. The team attributed their success to the comprehensive digital system design pathway taught at the department, which gave them the theoretical and practical knowledge that was instrumental in successfully building the accelerator.
The team also thanked the DVCon India team for providing a massive learning experience through this contest, assisting them in the implementation process, and giving them the opportunity to connect with experts from the industry and academia through the conference.
In 2023, ENTC became the 1st runners up.
