Avnet X-Fest Draws Record Crowds

That sigh of relief you can hear emanates from the Silica teams who have just concluded their five-month, 37-city global odyssey with the X-Fest technical seminar series.

It’s a sigh of contentment as the event has been smashing attendance expectations, defying the industry-wide crackdown on expenses and time spent away from designing the latest product.   

"X-fest attendance was up 120 per cent over projections," said Tim Barber, senior vice president, design chain business development, worldwide for Avnet Electronics Marketing. "Nearly 5,500 attendees came to sites throughout Asia, Europe, North America and Japan from October 2009 through February 2010 to participate in the unique workshop/exposition forum, which brought customers up-to-date on leading-edge technologies, and allows them to bring solutions to market more quickly and with greater expertise. Technology experts from Avnet and Xilinx presented a slate of multi-track training sessions ranging from building block to multi-supplier system level solutions showcasing innovative design techniques, methodologies and reference designs for today’s hottest applications from PCIe and video to wireless and embedded networking.

The free one-day training sessions offered practical, how-to system level design instruction featuring the Spartan®-6 and Virtex-6 FPGA families from Xilinx, as well as key enabling technologies from leading suppliers including Cypress Semiconductor, Intel, Maxim Integrated Products, NXP, Texas Instruments and others. 

Attendees said the solutions approach was the biggest draw of the event.

The Avnet X-fest event not only provided a communication platform between IC manufacturers and customers, but also a channel for customers to exchange their design thoughts.  

“I have found the X-Fest seminars of great use over the last few years and so have other members of my group,” said Spencer Saunders, enginnering manager – Platforms Group, at ARM in the U.K. “We try to ensure at least two engineers attend, to allow us to get coverage of the many useful parallel tracks. It gives us the ability to see products from other companies that complement the Xilinx FPGA enabling us to make informed decisions about board design and component section. With our development of a dual Virtex 6 prototyping board, this information has been useful and ensured we can develop and deliver in as short a time as possible.” 

“The supply chain’s appetite for solutions is growing. Engineers come to X-fest to learn real-world system design concepts that that they can apply directly to the challenges they face back in the lab,” said Barber. “Our unique multi-vendor, technical format creates a one-stop forum for engineers to get multiple supplier representation and the bundled solutions they need to compete in today’s demanding marketplace.”

 

If you missed the worldwide event, nil desperandum, you can still reap its educational benefits. Videos of the 12 workshops are available online at: http://em.avnet.com/xfestvideos

 

Plans are underway for the next X-Fest technical seminar series, tentatively scheduled to begin in the Spring or Fall of 2012.