World's First Programmable City Arises, Built on Xilinx FPGAs

By Bijan R. Rofoee, Mayur Channegowda, Shuping Peng, George Zervas, and Dimitra Simeonidou - Xcell Daily Blog, Jul. 15, 2015 – 

By 2050, the human population will have reached 9 billion people, with 75 percent of the world's inhabitants living in cities. With already around 80 percent of the United Kingdom's population living in urban areas, the U.K. needs to ensure that cities are fit for purpose in the digital age. Smart cities can help deliver efficiency, sustainability, a cleaner environment, a higher quality of life and a vibrant economy. To this end, Bristol Is Open (BIO) is a joint venture between the University of Bristol and Bristol City, with collaborators from industry, universities, local communities, and local and national governments. Bristol Is Open (www.bristolisopen.com) is propelling this municipality of a half million people in southwest England to a unique status as the world's first programmable city.

Bristol will become an open testing ground for the burgeoning new market of the Industrial Internet of Things -- that is, the components of the smart-city infrastructure. The Bristol Is Open project leverages Xilinx All Programmable FPGA devices in many areas of development and deployment.

PROGRAMMABLE CITY VS. SMART CITY: Smart cities aim to improve and enhance public and private service offerings to citizens in a more efficient and cost-effective way by exploiting network, IT and, increasingly, cloud technologies. To achieve this goal, smart cities rely extensively on data collected from citizens, the environment, vehicles and basically all the "things" present in the city. The more data that becomes available, the more accurately city operations can be analyzed, which in turn will lead to the design and availability of smart-city services.

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