If you use low-cost – er – cost-effective FPGAs, there’s great news. You’ll have more choices sometime next year. AMD has just provided more details on its Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA family, based on TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process. These FPGAs will directly compete with Altera’s Agilex 3 FPGAs, when they appear. When it declared its independence from Intel on February 29, Altera reiterated a commitment to extend the … Read More → "AMD announces I/O-heavy Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA subfamily for low-cost designs"
What could possibly be interesting about a new PC motherboard? New x86 CPU? Yawn. Fancy new cooling fan with blue LEDs? Oh puh-leeze! Integrated FPGA for hardware I/O and computational acceleration with system-level software standardization and API calls? Tell me more. AMD has announced a new PC motherboard architecture for embedded PC applications, which it calls the Embedded+ integrated computing platform. From a hardware perspective, the … Read More → "AMD’s x86 CPU and FPGA tango on Sapphire Technology’s Embedded+ PC motherboard"
A Fable:
Once upon a time, in the incredibly wealthy Kingdom of Silicon, there lived a scrappy company named Duchess Altera, who shared the Duchy of FPGAs with an archrival named Duchess Xilinx. For more than three decades, Duchess Altera and Duchess Xilinx battled for control of the Duchy of FPGAs. Then, Duchess Altera forged an alliance with Archduke Intel, … Read More → "FPGA maker Intel PSG spins out of Intel and adopts old name: Altera"
Microchip now offers a Flash-based microcontroller with an integrated programmable-logic block for less than half a dollar in volume. The nine members of the Microchip PIC16F13145 family (the ‘113, ‘114, ‘115, ‘123, ‘124, ‘125, ‘143, ‘144, and ‘145) sport the same 8-bit RISC microprocessor architecture as other members of the 16F family, but they also incorporate a new programmable-logic block called a Configurable Logic Block (CLB). …
Read More → "Tiny FPGA in Microchip’s latest PIC16 microcontroller adds real-time speed, sells for less than 50 cents"
Way, way back in my high school senior English class, I learned about the six critical components of a news story: who, what, when, where, why, and extent (5WE). Today’s story focuses on Intel’s expansive plans to retake the lead in the never-ending semiconductor race and primarily covers four of these critical story components: what, when, who, and why. Intel has announced that it plans … Read More → "Will 2024 Really Be Intel’s Year to Retake the Lead in Semiconductor Process Technology?"
The FPGA supplier known as Intel PSG (the Programmable Systems Group, formerly named Altera) will be announcing its new name and mission on February 29 – the leap day of a leap month of a leap year – because it’s being billed as a leap forward for the company. Get it? Consequently, I thought this would be a good time to document the early history of Altera from its … Read More → "Altera: The Once and Future FPGA Supplier, Part 2"