Articles – Page 211

August 22, 2013

Successful products are all about making customers happy. Or perhaps about fulfilling a need – I don’t know too many people that are happy each time they fill up at the gas station. But consider it a relative thing: if a market is competitive, then the players have to find ways to make you happier than the other guy will. That could mean that customers think you suck less than the other guys, but it’s something.

Should be simple, right? Figure out what makes your customer tick and then leverage that. But what should be simple … Read More → "Just Who Is the Customer?"

Damn You, Autocorrect!

Resist the Urge to Make your Technology Too Helpful

by Jim Turley

August 21, 2013

There’s a blog post making the rounds from a German PhD student who discovered that some photocopiers can spontaneously change the numbers on printed documents. He’d photocopy a page with a column of numbers, but the resulting copy had different numbers. It’s magic!

To be clear, we’re not talking about text that was just fuzzy or hard to read. The copier actively changed the document. It was swapping one number for another.

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Pro-Strength Tools

Do Commercial FPGA Tools Still Make Sense?

by Kevin Morris

August 20, 2013

We’ve talked a lot in these pages over the last decade about FPGA design tools. If you’ve been following along in your readers, you know that there has been a big question mark over the commercial EDA industry as far as going after the FPGA design market. The question mark is there for good reason. The two dominant FPGA companies, Xilinx and Altera, have each made huge investments in proprietary FPGA design tools. And, while they have always made a bit of a show of partnering with commercial EDA vendors, they have competed so vigorously ( … Read More → "Pro-Strength Tools"

Expensive Silicon

Transistor Costs are Hitting a Wall

by Bryon Moyer

August 19, 2013

Depending on whom you talk to, Moore’s Law says that something doubles every 18-24 months. It might be speed or number of transistors. But these days, as physics raises its ugly head, performance is taking a back seat to transistor density. And yet there’s a third parameter that has always been considered to be a proxy for density: cost.

The assumption has always been that the more transistors you can put in a small space, the cheaper everything is going to be. And that’s been a good assumption for a long time. Either you … Read More → "Expensive Silicon"

Avoiding the SoC Verification Iceberg

by Jim Turley

August 15, 2013

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an SoC in possession of well-verified IP, must be ready for tape-out. With due apologies to Jane Austen, this “truth” is more fantasy than fact. Of course, the IP components that make up a system-on-chip (SoC), whether from internal or external sources, must be thoroughly verified. However, this does not imply that simply plugging together well-verified IP will yield a functionally correct SoC. The “stitch and ship” approach introduces serious risks to an SoC project that can only be mitigated by a commitment to true system-level verification.

Too many SoC … Read More → "Avoiding the SoC Verification Iceberg"

Raindrops on Roses and Whiskers on Kittens…

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things About x86

by Jim Turley

August 14, 2013

Many years ago, I said that there are two kinds of programmers: those who admit they hate x86 processors, and liars. Over the intervening years, my attitude toward x86 chips has softened quite a bit, to the point where I actually like them now. I think the change of heart is because the chips themselves got better, not because I’ve gone all soft in the head. But you can decide for yourself.

If you haven’t used an embedded x86 chip in anger for the past 10 years or so, you might be in for a treat. … Read More → "Raindrops on Roses and Whiskers on Kittens…"

Systems on Interposer

“Chips” are So Passé

by Kevin Morris

August 13, 2013

The term “SoC” has been in use for about two decades now. Systems-on-Chip were a great idea, of course. Over the years, as we marched forward with Moore’s Law, steadily reducing the number of chips in our systems, we could see the finish line ahead of us somewhere. Eventually, we reasoned, this increased integration would allow us to put our entire system on a single chip. Sure enough, for many of us, our design elements dwindled from dozens to single digits, and ultimately approached that magical vanishing point – unity – one chip to rule them all.

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IoT Breakdown

Deconstructing the Internet of Things

by Bryon Moyer

August 12, 2013

Not long ago we covered the launch of Ayla Networks, whose goal is to simplify creating the Internet of Things (IoT). It sounded straightforward enough at the time.

That article spawned some further discussions that brought to light both the fact that there are a bunch of companies doing bits and pieces of this already and the fact that this isn’t as simple as you might think. And frankly, it’s really quite difficult to figure out what some of these companies … Read More → "IoT Breakdown"

Malcolmy: Entrails, Crystal Balls and Spreadsheets

Predicting the Semiconductor Future

by Dick Selwood

August 8, 2013

How do you know what is going to happen to you and your business in the future? In earlier times, you might have gone to a temple to have a goat or a chicken sacrificed and had the entrails examined. Or you might have made a pilgrimage to an oracle, like that at Delphi. In either case, the answers were never simple and required interpretation by priests, who charged for the privilege. Later you might have consulted a gypsy with a crystal ball, or an astrologer who interpreted the stars, or a practitioner of Tarot card reading.

EEMBC Polishes Ye Olde Whetstone

New Embedded Benchmark Quantifies Floating-point Performance

by Jim Turley

August 7, 2013

To paraphrase Mark Twain, there are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. People have been fudging their benchmark results for as long as there have been benchmarks. It’s easy enough to do. Indeed, it’s surprisingly hard not to distort benchmark results, even for the most scrupulously honest engineers. Measuring CPU performance ain’t like drag racing cars, and any comparison of benchmark scores inevitably boils down to an argument over what, specifically, you’re measuring.

Wading into this morass is EEMBC, the nonprofit organization that threw itself on the benchmarking grenade almost 20 years ago. … Read More → "EEMBC Polishes Ye Olde Whetstone"