Articles – Page 180

April 16, 2015

The European Union (EU) is a complicated beast. It isn’t a United States of Europe, although in some lights it can look like it, as it has laws that overrule those of member states, and it uses a common currency (although not all member states use the Euro).

Its roots are in the devastation of the Second World War, when a shattered Europe was rebuilding its industrial base and at the same time looking for ways to ensure that there would never again be conflict between European countries. It has been successful in both those aims … Read More → "ARTEMIS is Dead – Long Live ECSEL"

A Dialog with Imagination

Two Companies Want You to Wear Their Chips

by Jim Turley

April 15, 2015

Ooh, trends. Gotta love ’em. There are trends in music, trends in fashion, trends in politics, trends in economic theory, and trends in our good ol’ electronics business. Fortunately for us, almost all of the trends in the latter category are of the good, healthy, up-and-to-the-right, variety. Chips get faster, power efficiency improves, and software gets better. Well, two out of three.

Another trend is shrinkage, of course. On this, the 50^th anniversary of Moore’s Law, we’re still seeing our devices get smaller and smaller, to the point that we’re now wearing … Read More → "A Dialog with Imagination"

FPGAs in Space

Microsemi Launches New Space-bound Family

by Kevin Morris

April 14, 2015

In space, no one can hear you scream – about how your FPGA got hit by a neutron, which caused a single-event-upset, resulting in a bit-flip in a configuration cell and the ensuing very bad behavior. Of course, that scenario is science fiction because nobody who designs space-bound electronic systems would ever put a non-qualified device into orbit.

Space is an incredibly challenging environment for FPGAs. You’ve probably guessed that it’s prohibitively expensive to roll out a service truck and a technician to deal with a reliability problem in orbit. And you … Read More → "FPGAs in Space"

Revamped Digital IC Flow

Cadence Launches Innovus

by Bryon Moyer

April 13, 2015

It’s a familiar tale of woe: new silicon process nodes are creating an extreme burden for design tools.

When I say, “familiar,” it’s not just because everyone is bemoaning the current state of affairs, what with FinFETs and multiple patterning and other new features creating innumerable vexations. No, it seems that this happens after every few advances: the improvements made to nullify the last set of hurdles run out of steam in the face of the latest set of new hurdles. And so tools get rolled again.

The product of the tools – a … Read More → "Revamped Digital IC Flow"

The Vision Thing

Synopsys EV Processor for Games, Security, and Everything

by Jim Turley

April 8, 2015

Politicians used to argue about “the vision thing,” a borderline unintelligible swipe at opponents who didn’t share their view of the big picture. As a company, Synopsys may not be very political, but it’s definitely on board with the vision thing.

Embedded vision – that is, adding real-time image recognition to embedded systems – used to be a high-end, pie-in-the-sky kind of feature. Cheap systems couldn’t do image recognition, could they? They don’t have the processing power. And anyway, what would you do with it? Why does a thermostat need to recognize my face?

< … Read More →

Put an FPGA IN It

Flex Logix Debuts FPGA Cores for IC Designers

by Kevin Morris

April 7, 2015

Kato, Robin, Watson, Tonto, Spock, Barney, Hutch, Higgins, FPGAs – everyone knows the importance of a top-notch sidekick. We’ve seen FPGAs teamed up with countless heroes, parked next to just about every type of device you can imagine. And FPGAs are steadfast in the fulfillment of their duties – bridging the logic, driving the interfaces, accelerating the processing, scaling the video, integrating the peripherals – no task is too unglamorous for the hard-working FPGA – and it often manages several of these at once.

Today, if you’re designing a custom chip, chances are you’ve … Read More → "Put an FPGA IN It"

A 50×50 Photonics/MEMS Optical Switch

New Interchanges for Data Centers

by Bryon Moyer

April 6, 2015

Picture the huge datacenters run by Google and Facebook and their ilk. Imagine that, as big as they are, each of those datacenters serves only one company.

Now picture an Internet-of-Things (IoT) world where everything is connected, with data flying hither and yon, and with some non-trivial part of that data making its way to new datacenters built to handle the additional load. That could mean incredible distributed computing resources.

Even today, you may think of all the traffic that the internet sends to Google and Facebook – nothing to sneeze at, and yet it’s … Read More → "A 50×50 Photonics/MEMS Optical Switch"

Watching Apple

Even More Interesting Than Apple Watch

by Jim Turley

April 2, 2015

The 9 March event provided color on the Apple Watch; it revealed the future of Apple the company

Well that was interesting; at times, downright fascinating. I refer to the big Apple event last month. We learned more about Apple Watch—not a great deal more about the product itself, given that the functionality was detailed in the September 2014 event—and got multiple lessons in metallurgy. The fascinating bits were pricing and the implications therein for Apple corporate positioning moving forward.

Let’s begin with some honest scoring: how did I do with my … Read More → "Watching Apple"

XMOS xCore-200 Wants to Replace Peripherals

Deterministic Processor an Alternative to Typical Code Drivers

by Jim Turley

April 1, 2015

Oftentimes, the decision comes down to “FPGA or ASIC.” But what if the decision was “FPGA or microprocessor?”

That’s essentially the value proposition from XMOS, the British microprocessor company that pitches its products not as alternatives to the usual rogues’ gallery of CPUs, but as an alternative to an FPGA.

And now that decision gets a little bit tougher.

You see, in the usual hardware/software partitioning that we’re all familiar with, you start out with fixed hardware resources (some combination of a CPU or MCU, some fixed logic, and maybe … Read More → "XMOS xCore-200 Wants to Replace Peripherals"

Intel Plus Altera

What Would it Mean?

by Bryon Moyer

March 31, 2015

There has been rampant speculation this week on rumors that Intel is in negotiations to buy Altera – in a deal that should be worth over ten billion, and which would be the largest acquisition in Intel’s history. While neither company is saying anything public yet, there is a substantial amount of information available from which to evaluate the potential impact of such a move and to speculate about the reasons behind it.

We actually predicted this eight months ago in our aptly-named article “Read More → "Intel Plus Altera"