The Perils of Performance
Mentor HyperLynx Helps Handle the Hot Spots
Is it just me, or is digital design getting a lot trickier? We were all going along just fine, flipping our little zeroes and ones happily back and forth, and then somebody comes up with the brilliant idea to replace our nice, simple parallel busses with serial IO. OK, so maybe those parallel busses were not quite so simple by that time; it was starting to be nearly impossible to do the board layout so that all those signals arrived at somewhat the same time. To make matters worse, we kept raising the clock frequencies until “somewhat the same time” wasn’t even close to good enough anymore.
A New Crop of Wafer Inspection Tools
KLA-Tencor Announces Upgrades All Around
Nothing can ruin a die like a hunk of debris landing someplace inopportune.
Of course, it all depends on what constitutes “debris.” Not from a material standpoint – a chunk of anything that you didn’t put there on purpose is likely to be a problem – but rather from the point of view of size. Looked at in a Zen way, if a mote lands someplace in the middle of something bigger than itself without disturbing anything, does a production manager make any noise?
All the Signal Integrity You Can Shake A Stick At
Fish Fry Takes On DesignCon
Eye diagrams, Bert Scopes and more SerDes than anyone knows what to do with...what could it be? DesignCon of course. In this week’s Fish Fry, I look into to why DesignCon was so popular this year and why signal integrity issues were the un-offcial theme of the show. I also interview Brad Griffin of Cadence about why we need power distribution analysis and why he thinks DesignCon is the best show of the year.
I also have another MAX V CPLD Development Kit courtesy of Altera to give away this week, but you’ll have to listen to the end of the broadcast to find out how to win.
Does the World Need a New Microcontroller Family?
Everywhere you look there are microcontrollers. 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit; high speed or low power; single or multi-core; and an enormous range of peripherals and I/O. So does the world need another family? Infineon certainly thinks so.
Their reasoning runs like this. Over the last few years the company has been restructured to concentrate on three key areas, which it calls Energy Efficiency, Mobility and Security. In these areas it addresses specific markets, where it is either the largest player, or number two, with microcontrollers, power components and sensors.
The Importance of Being Modular
Xilinx Rolls a Huge Wave of Kits
In the good old days, there were FPGA kits galore. There was almost a carnival atmosphere. Every vendor with anything novel to sell would design their own FPGA board to go with it. Folks would stroll down the boardwalk, picking up all manner strange kits from street vendors. This one was in between the snake oil and liniment. That one was between two wind-up monkey toys. There were as many varieties of FPGA boards as there were Silicon Valley electronics sharks, and most of them were about as reliable.
A Passive Magic Wand
The EPIC Sensor Hits the Market
It’s the stuff of kids’ play and science fiction. A stick that has magic properties. Some such sticks execute actions at a distance – perhaps when accompanied by a cryptic incantation – while others may passively detect from a distance. It’s the latter we’re interested in today.
We are surrounded by information encoded into the electromagnetic ether through which we pass. Some of it is natural; some of it we have created ourselves. But here’s the thing that may be surprising: when we measure things electromagnetic, we’re pretty good at the magnetic part. Heck, a 50-cent compass can pick up the earth’s relatively weak magnetic field. We’re not so good at the electric part, however.
