PHOENIX —  Avnet Electronics Marketing, an operating group of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), kicked off the North American leg of the X-fest technical seminar series last week. With record-breaking attendee numbers, this year’s X-fest is shaping up to make a huge impact on the engineering community. For those unable to attend the remaining five North American dates, Avnet has created a short video to give engineers a birds-eye view of the event. The video can be viewed here: http://avnet.me/01625

“After we exceeded our attendance goal at the first event in Irvine, California – I knew that this year’s events were off to an incredible start,” said Tim Barber, senior vice president, global design chain business development, Avnet Electronics Marketing. “With the Xilinx 7 Series and Zynq-7000 EPP at its core, this year’s X-fest delivers a truly cohesive technical program. Avnet’s team of experienced engineers and our supplier partners have come together to deliver a day-long series of seminars that show engineers at every level the best ways to integrate today’s leading technology into their designs. We look forward to the next stops in North America, Europe and Asia.”

The X-fest 2012 program features twelve technical courses based on Xilinx’s new Artix™-7, Kintex™-7 and Virtex™-7 FPGAs, as well as the new Zynq™-7000 Extensible Processing Platform (EPP) family. Attendees have the ability to customize their day by picking up to four courses from any of the three unique training tracks:

• The FPGA Fundamentals track features four courses aimed at common design issues facing both new and advanced FPGA designers. Topics around Xilinx 28nm 7 series FPGAs include power design, optimizing memory interfaces, clocking and PCIe interface implementations.
• The Applications track delves deeper into design methodologies and techniques required in designing with the Zynq™-7000 EPP and 7 series FPGAs. Application-oriented topics include wired communications, motor control, video and real-world analog processing.
• The Zynq™-7000 EPP track provides four courses dedicated to the ARM® dual core Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ based device. Topics include an introductory overview of the Zynq-7000 EPP architecture, Zynq-7000 EPP development tools overview and software acceleration techniques using the Zynq-7000 EPP’s programmable logic.

Upcoming locations include Baltimore, Md; Dallas, Texas; and Minneapolis, Minn. For more information, visit www.em.avnet.com/xfest