April 2, 2014, Seoul – Altera Korea (Regional Manager Kim Dong-hoon, www.altera.com) announced that it will officially sponsor the 'Intelligent SoC Robot War,' an intelligent robot competition utilizing SoC (System on a Chip), in 2014. The 'Intelligent SoC Robot War (www.socrobotwar.org)', hosted by KAIST's System Design and Applications Research Center (SDIA), aims to cultivate advanced technical talent in the SoC field through the implementation of intelligent robots utilizing SoC, and to enhance national competitiveness through the revitalization of the SoC and intelligent robot sectors. This competition, targeting university and graduate students nationwide, is now in its 13th iteration, having begun in 2002.
Registration is open until April 15 through the website (http://www.socrobotwar.org).

The Intelligent SoC Robot War attracts approximately 80 universities, over 150 teams, and more than 600 students annually. Any team composed of two or more members, including university and graduate students, is eligible to participate. Participating teams are given the opportunity to attend theoretical and practical training on robots and intelligent robot platform boards. The 'Intelligent SoC Robot War' is divided into two events: HURO-competition and SoC Taekwon Robot. Altera provides the Cyclone® FPGA and all configuration components to be mounted on the development boards distributed to teams that advance to the finals after passing the competition qualification test conducted by event category following application. Altera will also donate DE-nano boards to the university laboratories of the eight teams that place in the finals in October.

< Altera Prize Support Details >
SoC Taekwon Robot 　 Huro-competition
1st Place DE0-nano 15 units 1st Place DE0-nano 15 units
2nd Place DE0-nano 10 units 2nd Place DE0-nano 10 units
3rd Place DE0-nano 5 units 3rd Place DE0-nano 5 units
4th Place DE0-nano 2 units 4th Place DE0-nano 2 units

"The Cyclone FPGA installed on the brain board of the intelligent SoC robot performs real-time processing of noise filtering on video imagery obtained through the robot's camera, and extracts specific colors and feature points. By calculating the distance and coordinates of the target being tracked by the robot, it serves as the core chip for image recognition," explained Professor Yoo Hoe-jun of KAIST.

Kim Dong-hoon, Regional Manager of Altera Korea, stated, "Altera has achieved advantages in various areas including SoC architecture, density, performance, and development tools, and provides valuable propositions useful to embedded systems developers. Furthermore, Altera SoC users can leverage a comprehensive ecosystem including operating systems, hardware design tools, and software development solutions from Altera, ARM, and third-party vendors, making these devices convenient to use. We are very pleased that Altera's University Program is sponsoring the 'Intelligent SoC Robot War' again this year, and we look forward to this competition contributing to nurturing future robot design engineers and helping develop systems that are highly optimized for performance and power while delivering outstanding reliability."