Articles – Page 155

September 26, 2016

Noooooo! Are you kidding me? How many times has this happened so far? You know tape-out is tomorrow, right? Dangit! <deep breath> Ok, what it is this time? … Yeah… ok… A timing problem… so in the bring-up sequence, you want to hold the 0 state in that stupid register for an extra cycle? In other words, you guys got the timing wrong and it’s now my job to cover your butts? And now if it doesn’t work or if we’re late, it’s my fault, right? Nice transfer of that hot potato. Jeesh… You … Read More → "Abstracting Register Sequences"

Tell Me What to Think

The Crayon Effect and New Product Development

by Jim Turley

September 21, 2016

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink” – proverb

Creativity is a funny thing. It seems so elusive at the time, yet so obvious after the fact. Take the Beatles’ Abbey Road. It’s hard to imagine a world without it. Was there ever really a time when nobody had ever heard “Something” or “Octopus’s Garden” or “Here Comes the Sun?” It seems like those songs have always been around, but before 1969 none of that music existed.

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 had to be … Read More → "Tell Me What to Think"

Xilinx vs Intel

The New Showdown in Programmable Logic

by Kevin Morris

September 20, 2016

Sunday! Sunday… SUNDAY! Get your tickets now! Fire-breathing System-in-Package FPGAs square off in a duel for the ages! See Xilinx’s FinFET-powered 16nm TSMC-fabbed UltraScale+ Virtex and Zynq take on Intel’s new Altera-powered Stratix and Arria Generation 10 SoC FPGAs and SiPs. Watch Quartus and Vivado spar for design tool supremacy! Feel the heat as distributors such as Avnet, Arrow and others pile on legions of FAEs armed with development kits, reference designs, and IP blocks in winner-take-all battles for dominance in communications, data center, automotive, industrial, and IoT applications. That’s right, we’ll sell you … Read More → "Xilinx vs Intel"

Interim Industrial Security

Icon Labs Firewalls Grandpa Equipment

by Bryon Moyer

September 19, 2016

The Internet of Things used to be a topic involving more questions than answers. How should we organize the network? What type of sensors? What type of communication? How to store data? Where to store data? Cloud or fog or both?

While I’m not going to suggest that all of those questions have been answered to everyone’s satisfaction (actually, they have been, many different ways, but there’s obviously not universal agreement on those answers), most questions have been muted as compared to the one big remaining question still being shouted from the rooftops: “How … Read More → "Interim Industrial Security"

Humans vs. Computers

Cloud Security Fails… Again.

by Jim Turley

September 14, 2016

“There is no cloud. It’s just someone else’s computer.” – Chris Watterston

It was all my fault. I know that now. Still, they could have made it easier.

One of the major cloud services – pick your favorite – recently suffered a security breach. Shock! Evidently someone hacked the service’s customer database and appropriated several million customer records, including mine. Like any good service provider, the company in question sent an oh-so-sweet email notification to its many millions of affected victims customers politely suggesting that they should, you … Read More → "Humans vs. Computers"

Xilinx Tackles the “Diagonal”

Winning at FPGA is a Complex Business

by Kevin Morris

September 13, 2016

Creating a successful new family of programmable devices is both easy and fun! You just guess which stuff to put on the chip, spend a few years and a couple hundred million dollars designing and building it, put all the software in place so people can design with it, and then, finally, push it out to the world and see if your “guess” turned out right. If it did? Yay! You win. If not, well, a career change is probably in order.

Xilinx has a track record of consistently creating the “right product” … Read More → "Xilinx Tackles the “Diagonal”"

New SRAMs Popping Up

The Venerable 6T Pedestal is Showing Cracks

by Bryon Moyer

September 12, 2016

SRAM is everywhere these days, mostly in its embedded form. As memory gets relatively cheaper or denser, it becomes more desirable to pack robust bunches of it into SoCs.

But let’s face it: standard SRAMs are a pain in the byte. They’re big, requiring 6 (or even 8) transistors for each bit of memory stored. And they’re power hogs, relatively speaking. So why do we love them so much? Because they’re fast, of course.

The 6T SRAM bit cell has been standard fare for many, many years, far outlasting other types of circuits. … Read More → "New SRAMs Popping Up"

The Anti-Tesla

Tiny Bumblebee Batteries Replenishes Hybrid Car Battery Packs

by Jim Turley

September 8, 2016

“If the car feels like it’s under control, you’re not going fast enough.” – Mario Andretti

Electric cars have been around since the 1830s. That’s more than 175 years of progress, from the early Davenport autocar to the Tesla Model S, BMW i8, or Karma Revero. Hybrid cars – that is, ones that combine both an internal-combustion engine and an electric motor – are a much more recent development. Hybrids are popular these days. Toyota says it’s … Read More → "The Anti-Tesla"

Intel’s First FPGAs

Altera Turns a Page

by Kevin Morris

September 7, 2016

They call themselves Intel now.

Sure, they still live in the Altera building and the technology is still unmistakably Altera’s, but the company has now turned the page, and the word “Intel” proudly silkscreened on the top deck of the company’s flagship Stratix 10 devices is a message to the world that things have now changed forever. For the past year or so, the sixteen billion dollar high-profile acquisition of Altera by Intel has been stewing in the pot – adding and removing ingredients, taste testing, and settling into the flavor profile that … Read More → "Intel’s First FPGAs"

Beacons As IoT Channels

Enmo Builds on BlueTooth Advertising

by Bryon Moyer

September 6, 2016

At any given moment, it’s hard to tell whether the Internet of Things (IoT) is a technology or a mish-mash of technologies. It tends to feels like more of the latter, with its massive pile of protocols and approaches.

Well, this week we look at yet another angle – one I hadn’t seen to date. To set this up, there are a couple of notions we should focus on. One is the idea of mobility. The company we’re going to discuss points out that fixed IoT edge nodes often connect directly to the cloud. A … Read More → "Beacons As IoT Channels"