Articles – Page 177

June 9, 2015

In a poker game, nobody wants to show his cards first. And with the ever-engaging Altera versus Xilinx high-stakes marketing match, it’s always riveting to see who will decide to be the first to disclose the details of their next-generation programmable logic family, and how and when the other will choose to respond.

The tensions have never been higher than in the current contest. Both companies are throwing incredible energy into the race to build the best-and-first programmable logic chips based on 14/16nm FinFET technology. This generation of devices promises to be … Read More → "Altera Stratix 10"

Granular SoC Power Control

Sonics and Mentor Graphics Attack From Different Angles

by Bryon Moyer

June 8, 2015

PCs have a rudimentary form of power management. Under a limited set of circumstances, a PC can reduce its own power consumption without your manually having to put it to sleep. As far as my experience tells me, the events that can cause a power down are inactivity and lid closure. And the power savings can be obtained by turning off the display and entering a sleep or hibernate state. This is pretty much the extent of what’s possible using the top level of the Power Options utility.

But let’s say you want to be … Read More → "Granular SoC Power Control"

Report on the Cisco 2015 Annual Security Report

A Reasonably Comprehensive Overview, with a Minimum of Self-Serving Corporate Promotion

by Bdkleinman

June 4, 2015

Large companies have large pools of resources. Occasionally, those resources document their work in a relatively coherent manner. And sometimes, these documents make for worthwhile reading. Such is the case now under discussion here: The Cisco 2015 Annual Security Report

Astronauts, Architects, and Memory Chips

Nantero’s Carbon-Nanotube Memory Challenges Flash

by Jim Turley

June 2, 2015

“That’s one small step for [a] man; one giant leap for mankind.” – Neil Armstrong, Tranquility Base, July 21, 1969

So this happened. A new type of memory chip went up in the space shuttle Atlantis as part of an experiment. The astronauts opened the giant doors and exposed the cargo bay to the expanse of space. Gamma radiation, cosmic rays, extreme cold followed by intense heat as the shuttle does a “rotisserie roll,” and any number of random magnetic fields all failed to affect the little memory chip. It came back with its contents intact, because … Read More → "Astronauts, Architects, and Memory Chips"

Selling the Soul of Innovation

Greed Trumps Vision in Technology Mergers

by Kevin Morris

June 2, 2015

A technology company has a kind of soul – a manifestation of a tribal culture that has evolved and matured from the earliest days of its founding. Building a bright-eyed startup into a large, successful enterprise requires a unique cocktail of vision, boundless energy, and commonality of purpose that instills upon the team a distinct personality that is evidenced in everything it does.

In countries with, perhaps, a bit more rigor in their application of the English language than the United States, companies are referenced with the plural verb: “Google ARE launching a new product.” This is a … Read More → "Selling the Soul of Innovation"

Redefining How Software Is Created

Cubicon Sees the IoT as an Opportunity for a Restart

by Bryon Moyer

June 1, 2015

The world they were planning to leave was a technology mess. They had watched how, in their short lifetimes, software had evolved from an obscure, tedious ritual practiced in large basements where the soundtrack mixed the hum of a room-sized mainframe computer with the whirr of Hollerith card readers, punctuated by the clatter of card punches, all the way to a commodity skill whose practitioners far outnumbered the dwindling numbers of hardware designers. Grade-school kids could now write software – either to run on their own computers or on some machine purportedly located in some cloud somewhere.

< … Read More →

Bend it like Silicon

Flexible Silicon and Plastic Circuits

by Dick Selwood

May 28, 2015

For some years, when I have travelled, my passport has been stowed in my hip pocket. This has worked well (apart from the incident with the cool wash cycle) but did mean that my passport developed a firm curve. Earlier this year I needed a new passport, and when it arrived, there was a firm instruction: “Do not Bend”. This is, presumably, because it has a chip inside, and, as we all know, silicon does not bend. But when you talk to, among others, Gerhard Klink of the Fraunhofer Institute’s “Group Polytronic Technologies” in Munich, he can show … Read More → "Bend it like Silicon"

Xilinx Loses Its Tail

The Next Evolutionary Step After FPGAs?

by Kevin Morris

May 27, 2015

It’s just semantics, right?

With the fast-paced evolution of electronic engineering, it’s difficult to maintain a context, a sense of perspective, a mental tourist map of the technological universe with a big red “You Are Here” star that helps us understand how everything relates to everything else. Humans have an instinctive need for situational awareness, and we crave some lynchpins to which we can make fast our psychological ships – preventing them from drifting aimlessly into the gray chaotic expanse of static noise.

One of the tricks that helps us keep our frame of … Read More → "Xilinx Loses Its Tail"

Ignore Those Pesky Bugs

Software is Complicated, But How Much of it is Useful?

by Jim Turley

May 26, 2015

“We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” – Donald Rumsfeld

Consider the humble ladder. It’s a hardware device that’s elegant in its simplicity. Two parallel side rails, with evenly spaced rungs in between. Everything you need; nothing you don’t. Ladders can be made of wood, metal, Fiberglas, or other materials. There are long ones, short ones, portable ones, and permanent ones. Nobody really … Read More → "Ignore Those Pesky Bugs"

Portable Heterogeneous Multicore

The HSA Foundation’s New SoC Architecture

by Bryon Moyer

May 25, 2015

So you’ve got some compute-intensive work to do, and you need the results really fast. OK, well, here: I wrote some code that takes full advantage of the nifty multicore processor so that it can run multiple calculations at the same time and get it all done so much faster.

Oh, wait, you didn’t want to use the CPU cores? You wanted to use the GPU? Dang… OK, well, let me go recode this and get right back to you.

Oh, you wanted to use the GPU only … Read More → "Portable Heterogeneous Multicore"