Articles – Page 181

March 30, 2015

I know, I know, you’re all at the edge of your seats, wondering if it’s ok to start designing assuming EUV lithography. Actually… I suppose if it’s critical to you, you’ve already got inside tracks and you attend all the update sessions, so you’re probably already up to speed. But the rest of you are just dying to know, I’m sure.

SPIE Advanced Litho happened recently, and there are three larger stories to tell here, although, at present, unless something changes, it seems like only two of them will have an … Read More → "It’s EUV Season Again"

TI MCU Goes 32-Bit

New MSP432 Family is ARM-Based… Of Course

by Jim Turley

March 24, 2015

Spring is sprung. The grass is riz. I wonder where the chips they is. – Justifiably Anonymous

Springtime means growth. Growth means change. Change means adjusting to new things.

For TI’s perennial MSP430 family of MCUs, today marks the start of a new season. A new branch on the family tree, if you will. For today, the MSP430 grows up – to 32 bits. It has reached that awkward adolescent stage where it has outgrown its toy box but isn’t quite ready for a desk job. It was time for a big change, a … Read More → "TI MCU Goes 32-Bit"

HLS is the New Black

Cadence Stratus Ushers In a New Era

by Kevin Morris

March 24, 2015

It’s been more than twenty years since I started working on high-level synthesis (HLS). You might say I’ve studied the topic a lot. For most of those two-plus decades, HLS has been widely considered the “design methodology of the future.” And there are those who have held onto the belief that it always will be.

For those of you not in tune with the terms, high-level synthesis is the automatic creation of hardware architectures from behavioral descriptions. At first, HLS was known as “behavioral synthesis.” But, after some early bad experiences, … Read More → "HLS is the New Black"

A Low-Power Gyro – For Real

Harnessing Slosh

by Bryon Moyer

March 23, 2015

We (or, at least, most of us) don’t have fancy navigational gadgets in our cars. (Your phone doesn’t count.) We expect the planes we fly on or the ships we sail on to have gyroscopes, but we don’t expect that, in our car, buried deep under the hood somewhere, lurks a classic gimbally sort of contraption madly spinning away and keeping us on the straight and narrow.

But… as you drove in to work today, you may well have been accompanied by a crude gyroscopoid thingy. (No, I’m still not talking about your … Read More → "A Low-Power Gyro – For Real"

Programming Dark Matter

Intel’s MMU is a Handy Tool to Prevent Hacking

by Jim Turley

March 18, 2015

One of the many charms of the x86 processor architecture is its fantastically complex memory-management unit. First-time programmers fall to their knees, quailing in fear, at the thought of programming a Core i7 chip’s MMU. Grown men cry. Horses weep. Concrete structures crumble.

But like any tool, the MMU can be used for good or for evil. In this case, it’s both at the same time. Security researcher Jacob Torrey, building on the work of many x86 programmers before him, has worked out a way … Read More → "Programming Dark Matter"

Software Defines Everything

Xilinx Announces SDSoC

by Kevin Morris

March 17, 2015

The world of system design used to be a simple place. Hardware engineers designed hardware, and software engineers wrote software. The hardware folks sat in labs, hooked things up with wires and connectors and soldering irons, and worried about current and voltage. The software engineers sat in front of computers, used editors and debuggers, and wrote, worried about, and debugged code. They played on different company softball teams, ate in different parts of the company cafeteria, and wore different styles of clothing.

Then, one day, hardware started to become a little more like … Read More → "Software Defines Everything"

Midrange Embedded Memory for Analog

Synopsys Shrinks an NVM Cell

by Bryon Moyer

March 16, 2015

Memory comes in many flavors. That’s because it’s used for so many different things, and requirements vary widely. We’re used to DRAMs, which we need to be able to get at often and quickly, and we’re used to FLASH, which needs to keep its contents after the power is turned off.

But there is other usage to be found on the other end of the volatility spectrum. At the far end is “one-time programmable” memory – OTP. For instance, if you use memory bits to store calibration information or to trim in some parameter, … Read More → "Midrange Embedded Memory for Analog"

Safety ‘n’ Security

The Next Big Thing?

by Dick Selwood

March 12, 2015

The scene: A hotel breakfast room. There are several groups, mostly of men wearing the same logo-marked polo shirt, or matching ties, speaking English and having breakfast. Out of one group comes, “Their BIOS was rubbish, so we had to write a completely new one.” Welcome to Nuremberg during embedded world.

For three days all the hotels are packed, despite having doubled their room rates. The U-Bahn (Metro) adds extra services from the city centre to the Exhibition site, and over 900 exhibitors are visited by more than 20,000 people. Amongst them are the editors, rushing around to their … Read More → "Safety ‘n’ Security"

Of Soft Balls and Hard Cracks

Engineering Gets Tougher for a Reason

by Jim Turley

March 11, 2015

“The only real sports are bullfighting, mountain climbing, and automobile racing. All others are mere games.” – Ernest Hemingway

We’ve all made the joke, “If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.” And in the professions of engineering, programming, debugging, or testing, that’s actually true. It’s not easy because it’s not supposed to be easy. In fact, we do our best to prevent our jobs from ever being easy.

It’s not out of masochism. Or a Hemingway-esque sense of challenge. It’s because that’s the … Read More → "Of Soft Balls and Hard Cracks"

Taking the FPGA Pulse

Who Does What and With What?

by Dick Selwood

March 10, 2015

For years now various people have been tracking the EDA process for ASICs and SoCs, and we have a pretty good idea of what the problems are and where the bottlenecks are. (Although we don’t seem, for some reason, to be able to take corrective action to solve the problems and remove, or at the least, ease the bottlenecks.)

FPGAs are now generally big beasts, comparable in complexity to the custom products of only a few years ago. To some extent, their development process has not been tracked, in part because (usually) the developers use the … Read More → "Taking the FPGA Pulse"