Academia Highlights
Penn State Behrend
Thuja
A student team at Penn State Behrend built Thuja, a terminal UI framework in Ada featuring an ECS core, flexbox-style layout, and diff-based rendering, as their SWENG 480 capstone.
Penn State Behrend
Adabmp
A Penn State Behrend capstone team built adabmp, an open-source JTAG programmer for Artix-7 FPGAs written end to end in Ada, using a low-cost Raspberry Pi Pico instead of a vendor cable to load bitstreams and flash a RISC-V soft core.
Penn State Behrend
Wishbone-NPU
The Wishbone-NPU is an open-source hardware accelerator built by a Penn State Behrend capstone team, offloading neural network inference from RISC-V soft-cores to dedicated FPGA logic. Paired with an Ada firmware library, the project runs a full pipeline from training in Keras through to INT8 deployment on hardware.
Rose-Hulman
Programmer
See how Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology capstone team built a JTAG programmer in Ada by turning a $10 STM32F070 Nucleo into a tool that configures a Gowin FPGA and uploads firmware to its RISC-V bootloader, down to the registers in Ada 2012.
George Mason
CubeSat Prototype using a NEORV32
A six-student capstone team at George Mason University built a CubeSat prototype spanning the full stack, from a custom power stage to an IMU interfaced with a NEORV32 RISC-V soft-core running Ada firmware, streaming telemetry to a ground station for live 3D visualization. The project took home the Best Project award.
Penn State Behrend
PSU Ada Game Engine
A Penn State Behrend capstone team built PSU.Ada.GameEngine, an ECS-based 2D game engine in Ada that talks directly to the platform, with a hand-rolled Wayland binding on Linux and native Win32 bindings on Windows, with no middleware in sight. The team proved it out with a playable Arkanoid demo running on both OSes.
Penn State Behrend
Helios
Spanning risk modeling to downlink, Helios is a wildfire-watching CubeSat prototype built by a capstone team, with Ada flight software running on a NEORV32 RISC-V soft-core to capture and transmit images tasked by a ground-based risk classifier.
Penn State Behrend
SAILGate
A student team at Penn State Behrend explored the idea of building a domain-specific hardware language (DSL) embedded in ParaSail—one that lowers to VHDL for use with standard gateware toolchains.
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
R7D
R7D, designed by a group of students is the first iteration of a Lattice ECP5 FPGA board enabling an Ada-first, Alire-managed ecosystem with flexible power, SRAM/FRAM, and modular I/O.
Penn State Behrend
VDI Challenge
A Penn State Behrend Capstone team used Ada for the VDI racing challenge: bare metal control with real time tasking and an OpenCV style Ada library, integrated into an event driven demo.
Penn State Behrend
Yarlib
A Penn State Behrend Capstone team built an Ada-only 2D game engine inspired by Raylib, with no C bindings, native Win32 and audio, an ECS design, and a playable demo delivered.
Penn State Behrend
RINA for Space
A talented group of Capstone students at Penn State Behrend built DTN on RINA in Ada, simulating a Mars rover relaying data to Earth over intermittent links, with policies handling delay and bundling.