Articles – Page 132

January 17, 2018

There is no question we are in the era of massively collaborative engineering. The world-changing electronic system technologies being developed today – IoT, autonomous cars, AI, robots – are all the products of thousands or tens of thousands of engineers working together, developing new components, subsystems, software, and techniques. The hive-mind approach permeates just about every type of engineering project, and with large multi-disciplined teams attacking each major task, the level of specialization in engineering just continues to grow.

Collectively, we work on the expansive scaffolding developed by our predecessors. Design tools empowered with the latest algorithms and massive … Read More → "Be a Great Engineer"

The Bisquick Alternative

SiFive Uses RISC-V to Simplify SoC Creation

by Jim Turley

January 16, 2018

“If you’re trying to create a company, it’s like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.” – Elon Musk

“Our vision is to enable two guys in a garage to build a custom chip.” Thus spake Jack Kang, Vice President of SiFive, the 40-person startup making RISC-V chips. SiFive isn’t just another company pulling the RISC-V bandwagon. They’re trying to change the way we create SoCs. The au courant open-source processor design is just a means to that end.

Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Schooling

Minima Raises the DVFS Bar

by Bryon Moyer

January 15, 2018

Let’s start by getting one thing straight: Minima Processor is not a processor company. It’s a processor-related IP company, and, most specifically (at least for now), it’s a DVFS (dynamic voltage and frequency scaling) IP company.

If you’re not familiar with DVFS, it’s a way of changing power supply rail voltages and clock frequencies on the fly so that you can push hard when necessary and possible and then throttle back at other times. The idea is based … Read More → "Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Schooling"

Spectre and Meltdown and iPhone Batteries and Henny Penny

The Sky May Not be Falling. Yet.

by Kevin Morris

January 9, 2018

Last week, we learned of two significant security vulnerabilities in the most common processor architectures, which are now used in just about every digital system on the planet. Our own Jim Turley wrote a great explanation of the problem. Predictably, the world responded with alarm, indignation, and a total lack of actual comprehension. After all – these bugs were launched with a full-on marketing frenzy. These bugs have Logos! A panic swept the tech world unlike anything we had seen since… a few days earlier when Apple “ … Read More → "Spectre and Meltdown and iPhone Batteries and Henny Penny"

Emerging MEMS and Sensors

AMFitzgerald Presentation Glimpses the Future

by Bryon Moyer

January 8, 2018

The MEMS and Sensors Industry Group (MSIG) held their annual executive congress a couple of months ago. That would mean it’s time for Alissa Fitzgerald, principal at AMFitzgerald, to present what’s happening deep in the MEMS research space.

I’m also bringing in two other sources for this story – Vesper and VTT, since one of the new-technology themes relates to piezoelectric materials. So we’ll start with that and then move through the others.

As a reminder, each of these technology stories can be measured on a scale that attempts to quantify a “ … Read More → "Emerging MEMS and Sensors"

Hardware Bugs Afflict Nearly All CPUs

Twin Spectre and Meltdown Flaws Affect Intel, ARM, and AMD

by Jim Turley

January 4, 2018

“Is this going to be a standup fight, sir, or another bug hunt?” – PFC Hudson, Aliens

Here’s the tl;dr: A pair of separate but related hardware bugs afflict almost all ARM and x86 processors made over the past ten years, and sometimes far longer. Both bugs have lain dormant for all that time, meaning nearly every PC, server, cell phone, and cloud service you can name is affected, and has been for quite a while. Because it’s a silicon problem, there’s no easy hardware patch, but software workarounds have already begun … Read More → "Hardware Bugs Afflict Nearly All CPUs"

Crossing the Reconfigurable Computing Chasm

Intel FPGA SDK for OpenCL

by Kevin Morris

January 3, 2018

In 1960, Gerald Estrin presented “Organization of computer systems: the fixed plus variable structure computer” at the western joint IRE-AIEE-ACM computer conference. His abstract reads in part: “…a growing number of important problems have been recorded which are not practicably computable by existing systems. These latter problems have provided the incentive for the present development of several large scale digital computers with the goal of one or two orders of magnitude increase in overall computational speed.” – and his solution to the problem is given in the title “the fixed plus variable structure computer” – thus giving birth to the concept of … Read More → "Crossing the Reconfigurable Computing Chasm"

Sweating the Small Stuff

All That Effort, Only to be Tripped Up by a Stupid Switch

by Jim Turley

January 2, 2018

“Don’t sweat the petty things, and don’t pet the sweaty things.” – George Carlin

Ah, yes. The old “make versus buy” decision. For months, I’ve been thinking I’d like to have a gizmo that would (a) tell me if my garage door were open, and (b) allow me to close it remotely. Turns out, that’s a popular request. A bunch of companies make exactly that.

My needs were so basic that I was tempted to build one myself. How hard can it be? Grab a cheap development board (Arduino, … Read More → "Sweating the Small Stuff"

Living On the Edge

EdgeX Defines an “Edge” Framework

by Bryon Moyer

January 1, 2018

Ah, words… Simple audio utterances that contain meaning. Well, except when they don’t. Or when each of us parses a different meaning out of a given collection of phonemes, making even morphemes morph.

In our world of technology, in particular, we deal with inordinately complex concepts, and we have to find shorthand ways of referring to them, or else we’d forever be locked up with convoluted phrases like, “a single binary unit of information” instead of “bit.” And, in most cases, for purposes of communicating in the English language, we borrow from the vast English … Read More → "Living On the Edge"

Altium Amps PCB

Desktop Design Grows Up

by Kevin Morris

December 20, 2017

Altium (long ago known as Protel) has long distinguished themselves as the provider of PCB tools for the mainstream. They based their business on the notion that many designers and small design teams don’t have the budget, patience, or need for the big enterprise-scale board design tools offered by EDA companies like Mentor and Cadence. Instead, they focused on the “desktop” market, blazing trails in highly capable PCB tools that typically ran on Windows PCs.

Over the years, the company has … Read More → "Altium Amps PCB"