BEEcube’s Academic Program strives to make the latest FPGA based computer systems available to higher education and research communities on a whole range of application domains. BEEcube is a spin out from the University of California, Berkeley, where founders conducted decades of leading research on the FPGA-based Berkeley Emulation Engine (BEE) platforms and development environments.

BEEcube was formed to produce and market high-end FPGA platforms for real-time system prototyping and computation acceleration. Through the BEEcube Academic Program, BEEcube is returning to its roots and giving back by offering special discounts and donations to academic research communities worldwide.

As a Third Party Alliance member of the Xilinx University Program (XUP), BEEcube is able to donate the Xilinx Virtex-5 chips for BEE3 systems sold to universities. In addition, BEEcube distributes its state of the art software, BEEcube Platform Studio (BPS)-Lite free of charge to universities. BPS-Lite software provides an accelerated design flow dramatically easing the use of Xilinx FPGAs and making FPGA design more accessible to developers, students, and academic researchers. BPS-Lite is available for use on the Xilinx XUPV5-LX110T single FPGA platform optimized for teaching and research purposes. BPS can also be used to develop software for application for BEEcube’s BEE3 high-end four FPGA systems, or for combinations of FPGA platforms, including clusters of multiple BEE3s.

BEEcube has deployed over 100 BEE3 systems as well as BPS-Lite to leading universities worldwide including the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Imperial College London, Cambridge University, Tokyo University, Peking University, University of California, San Diego, Tsinghua University, University of California, Los Angeles, and many more.

There are over 50 published research papers that highlight BEEcube technology and solutions including the 2010 ACM Best Student Paper Award titled, “ParaLearn: A Massively Parallel, Scalable System for Learning Interaction Networks on FPGAs”.

If you would like additional information about the BEE3, BPS-Lite, the BEEcube Academic Program, or published papers referencing the BEE3, click here.