Articles – Page 232

July 19, 2012

It was the Surface announcement that finally did it for me.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced its intention to make cool new tablet computers, called Surface. CEO Steve Ballmer and other senior executives held up two shiny new tablets, a big one and a small one, and demonstrated all the slick new things they could do. The announcement made the front page of the Wall Street Journal as well as newspapers and tech blogs around the world. “Game on!” everyone said. “Now Apple has a credible competitor to the iPad.” … Read More → "The Microsoft-alypse"

No Room for Error: Creating Highly Reliable, High-Availability FPGA Designs

by Kevin Morris

July 19, 2012

Designers of FPGAs for military and aerospace applications need to increase the reliability and availability of their designs. This is particularly true in the case of mission-critical and safety-critical, high-reliability and high-availability FPGA design including: FPGA design and verification flows, methodologies, processes and standards, architectural and algorithmic exploration, geographically distributed design teams, IP selection and verification, DO-254 compliance and much more.

by: Angela Sutton, Staff Product Marketing Manager, Synopsys

… Read More →

Does the World Need a New Programming Language?

by Dick Selwood

July 18, 2012

The linear execution of a program by a processor is unnatural. It was the way in which the first computers of von Neumann and Turing operated, in part because the resources needed to create even a single processor were enormous. It has continued to be the way in which computers operate just because “it is the way in which computers work.” Well perhaps that is a bit unfair, but if we train thousands of people to think in ways that allow them to develop systems that execute linearly, then it is very hard to get them to think in … Read More → "Does the World Need a New Programming Language?"

Livin’ on the Edge

Xilinx Shipping Artix Low-Cost FPGAs

by Kevin Morris

July 17, 2012

Xilinx has announced that they are now shipping the first members of the new 28nm, low-cost, Artix family, rounding out the lineup of three 28nm families they announced a couple of years ago. The Artix-7 A100T device has now “shipped” and is in the hands of eager engineers, ready to push their next design to the very edge of possibility.

Starting with the 28nm process node, Xilinx re-named their product families. In the old days (with “today” being counted as one of the “old days” already), we had Virtex and Spartan. Virtex was the bad-ass, balls-to-the-wall, … Read More → "Livin’ on the Edge"

Living In the Shadows

isiQiri Detects Touch with Light

by Bryon Moyer

July 16, 2012

It’s funny… You’d think that, with touchscreens now in the hands of so many consumers, touch technology has to be a done deal. Moving on to the next thing. (Of course, then I see my own phone’s touchscreen get a life of its own, with phantom touches dancing all over the screen faster than I could ever do, calling people and adding nonsense contacts all without any involvement on my part, and it feels like touch has a long way to go.)

Late last year we took a look at Read More → "Living In the Shadows"

Does Hardware Multi-threading Belong in Embedded CPU’s?

by Dick Selwood

July 12, 2012

Synthesizable embedded microprocessors surpassed stand-alone conventional CPU’s in unit volumes several years ago, and are beginning to catch up to them in performance and feature complexity. Hardware multi-threading (as distinct from software multi-threading) is one of those advanced features. But does hardware multi-threading (MT) have any applicability in a synthesizable embedded space where superscalar and multicore offerings appear to dominate? If yes, where and how does it help?

History of MT

Intel pioneered multi-threading at the beginning of the millennium with hyper-threading in the Xeon and Pentium 4, and they … Read More → "Does Hardware Multi-threading Belong in Embedded CPU’s?"

Software That Can Kill

by Dick Selwood

July 10, 2012

I had intended to write about automotive matters today, but instead my eye was caught by a link on The Risks Digest: “Software Failures Responsible for 24% Of All Medical Device Recalls.”

So I followed through to the source document, the report of the FDA’s (the United States Food and Drug Administration) Office of Science and Engineering Laboratories (OSEL). Within the OSEL is the Division of Electrical and Software Engineering (DESE), whose remit is to look at electrical and electronic technology and … Read More → "Software That Can Kill"

WaterFail

Why Agile Must Come to Hardware

by Kevin Morris

July 10, 2012

Just over a decade ago, 17 frustrated software engineers made a pilgrimage to the top of a mountain in Utah. (OK, they really just went to a resort for a boondoggle, but bear with us here). After several days of soul-searching, they descended from the mountain with a manifesto that would forever change the face of software development. The Agile Manifesto codified what coders had been thinking and saying for years: The waterfall development process – the prime directive for professional-grade software development for most of the history of software development itself – was badly broken.

The traditional waterfall development … Read More → "WaterFail"

Beyond Free Space

RSoft Adds to Synopsys’s Light Tools

by Bryon Moyer

July 9, 2012

Light has always been a finicky physical phenomenon. It seems all straightforward until you get to high school and learn about how Einstein burst our naïve bubble by positing light as a jealous god that brooks no competition in the race between here and wherever.

And then there’s that shape-shifting thing it does, “Look Mom, I’ve a wave! Ooo, now look: Ta-daaaa! I’m a particle!” That has put a permanent end to the days of blithely placing maple leaves over photo-sensitive paper to create a facsimile that can be tacked to the refrigerator. … Read More → "Beyond Free Space"

Hot Links

Are Symbolic Links Evil?

by Bryon Moyer

July 5, 2012

This topic was going to be a blog post, but, when the dust settled, it got turned into an article (as you can see by the length). You see, what should be a simple discussion became not so much so. And there’s a tendency in some corners of our industry not to come out and deal with an issue, but to whisper things in blogs and anonymous posts here and there, raising more questions than are answered.

My desire in what follows was originally to clear up facts. I must confess that I have not come … Read More → "Hot Links"