The awesome new AMD devices to which I’ve just been introduced have sparked a trip down memory lane (I know you’re surprised, because I pride myself on my laser-like focus that prevents me from wandering off into the weeds). I remember the 1970s and early 1980s when we thought the simple programmable logic devices (PLDs) of the time were so cool. Those were heady days … Read More → "AMD Rocks with New Versal Gen 2 AI Edge SoC FPGAs"
Like so many of the technologies we take for granted today, I managed to find myself embroiled in the very early days of hardware emulation. This refers to the process of imitating the behavior of one piece of hardware (typically a silicon chip you are in the process of designing) with another piece of hardware (typically a special-purpose emulation system).
… Read More → "A Brave New World of Emulation and Software Prototyping"
“The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,” a Hugo-award-winning SF novel published by Robert Heinlein in 1966, is an apt title that explains why so many actual moon missions fail. Landing on the Earth’s moon safely is hard. The first spacecraft to crash on the moon was the USSR’s Luna 2 spacecraft. It “impacted” the moon in 1959, followed by the first US spacecraft to impact the moon, … Read More → "Intuitive Machines sticks its moon landing (mostly), with emergency help from two on-board FPGAs"
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"
