Sérgio Pereira, David Cerdeira and Cristiano Rodrigues, researchers at the ALGORITMI Center and students of the PhD Program in Electronics and Computer Engineering, under Sandro Pinto’s supervision, won the Xilinx Open Hardware 2021 competition (PhD category) with the project “TEEOD: Trusted Execution Environments On-Demand via Reconfigurable FPGA“.

The project explores FPGA technology, which Xilinx is one of the leading manufacturers in the world, to create execution environments with additional security guarantees compared to conventional systems.

For Sandro Pinto, winning the competition was important in several dimensions, namely:

“- Demonstrates the quality of research that is currently already practiced at UMinho, as well as the ability to attract industry/companies of the highest level to that research (knowledge transfer);

– The team will be given the opportunity to present the idea (in pitch form) to the CTO of Xilinx, a multi-billion company listed on international markets. The idea may attract investment for possible partnerships;

– We have already received contacts from top international universities for potential research collaborations. This allows for increased networking as well as partnerships that may culminate in further investment attraction.

– Last but not least, it helps motivate the “youth” to work with us and show that “we” can do it too.”

The Xilinx Open Hardware contest annually challenges students to develop and implement innovative ideas with technology commercialized by Xilinx. Every year the contest counts with the participation of the best European universities, such as ETH Zurich, TU Munich, Politecnico di Milano, Univeristy of Oxford, and many others.

More info at http://www.openhw.eu/2021

Congratulations to the whole team!