Articles – Page 234

New Episode – Circular Placement for Multi-Channel Designs – Altium’s Design Secret Video Series

June 13, 2012

Watch a selection of short videos featuring tips, tricks and processes to get the most out of designing with Altium.

Circular Placement for Multi-Channel Designs

Altium Designer’s Multi-Channel capability lets designers power through new designs that re-use common schematic sheets (channels) multiple times. Having settled on the component placement and routing of one instance of the design block, the same relative placement and routing can be pushed … Read More → "New Episode – Circular Placement for Multi-Channel Designs – Altium’s Design Secret Video Series"

FREE Webinar: Introduction to Designing with Altium

by Jim Turley

June 13, 2012

In this free webinar, Altium experts around the world will take you through an introduction to Altium Designer key technologies and show you inside our engineering team to give you a full understanding of our vault-driven electronics design methodology. This Webinar provides you with an overview of the features and functions of:

Design Capture
Interfaces to Databases
PCB Layout & Routing
Mixed-Signal Simulation & … Read More → "FREE Webinar: Introduction to Designing with Altium"

Vault-driven Electronics Design Whitepaper

by Kevin Morris

June 12, 2012

The ‘endgame’ for any board design is to generate and manage data from that design for building the
physical object captured by that design – and with the utmost integrity. However, the need to ensure
high-integrity data often walks hand-in-hand with layers of bureaucratic ‘red tape’, resulting in the designer being confined to design according to formalized processes, locking down design changes to ensure
minimal impact to the integrity of the design data.

Considering the electronics development process, Altium Designer’s unified platform – with a single unified data model representing the system being designed – has … Read More → "Vault-driven Electronics Design Whitepaper"

Flexras Makes a Finer Cut

FPGA Partitioning for the Modern Era

by Kevin Morris

June 12, 2012

If you’ve worked with large designs that need to be partitioned into multiple FPGAs, you’ve probably often thought how awesome automatic partitioning would be. You just throw your big’ol design at a fancy EDA tool, push the big green “GO” button, and BAM! Your whole design is sliced up into pieces – just like in one of those martial arts movies where the ninja slices the bad guy into about seven pieces so cleanly that he doesn’t even start to fall apart right away.

Your design would be cleanly ninja-sliced into perfect partitions that … Read More → "Flexras Makes a Finer Cut"

Formal Solutions from Formal Technology

Jasper Restructures JasperGold

by Bryon Moyer

June 11, 2012

I don’t have any data to prove this, but it is my conjecture that very few of the people doing marketing in high tech have any formal marketing training. I’m not even saying whether this is a good or bad thing (you could argue it either way). But the result is that certain basic lessons get learned over and over.

For example, we get it drilled through our heads repeatedly: people don’t care about features; they want the benefits that accrue from those features. We remind ourselves of this from … Read More → "Formal Solutions from Formal Technology"

Revitalizing the Chip Startup Environment

Part 3: A New Role for VCs

by Bryon Moyer

June 7, 2012

[Editor’s note: this is the third and final installment in a series of articles on ideas for revitalizing Silicon Valley. The prior installment can be found here. Your comments – in agreement or not – are welcome.]

In the first installment of the “Revitalizing the Chip Startup Environment” article series, the Lean Chip Startup (LCS) model was introduced as a new methodology for managing the operational and financial aspects of semiconductor ventures. … Read More → "Revitalizing the Chip Startup Environment"

What Is 5 Times x86?

AMD Launches Embedded x86 Processors… Again

by Jim Turley

June 6, 2012

If the Earth is about to be hit by a meteor and you’ve got only 10 seconds to read this article, here’s the takeaway: some AMD processors now have 5-year lifespans.

Still with us? Splendid. That’s good news for embedded designers (the five-year thing, I mean), because AMD processors usually have the shelf life of a Harlequin romance novel. They follow the boom-and-bust cycles of PC fashion, dying off and getting replaced by faster or more elaborate versions every few months. That’s fine for the PC market, but it drives embedded designers nuts because … Read More → "What Is 5 Times x86?"

Heterogeneous FPGAs are Here!

Well, Kinda’

by Kevin Morris

June 5, 2012

In the wild world of semiconductor marketing, it is often difficult to tell what is true, what is false, what is hoped or wished, and what is probably-going-to-be-true-pretty-soon (so we’ll just go ahead as if it were true anyway).

3D FPGAs are like that.

We all want 3D FPGAs, right? Right? Well, maybe, uh – 3D ones certainly seem like they’d be an improvement over 2D ones and – I enjoyed “Avatar,” but my friend got motion sickness… OK, what can 3D FPGAs do that 2D ones can’t?

For a lot of … Read More → "Heterogeneous FPGAs are Here!"

EM Microelectronic Announces the EM9301, the World’s Lowest Voltage Bluetooth® Low Energy Controller

by Kevin Morris

June 5, 2012

Marin, Switzerland – June 4th, 2012 – EM Microelectronic announces its Bluetooth smart-qualified controller, the EM9301. Optimized for ultra-low power wireless sensing, remote control and monitoring applications, the EM9301 operates on as little as 0.8V. It can be powered by a wide range of common single-cell batteries or energy harvesters such as solar cells, piezo-electric and electro-magnetic elements. The EM9301 is fully Bluetooth smart qualified … Read More → "EM Microelectronic Announces the EM9301, the World’s Lowest Voltage Bluetooth® Low Energy Controller"

Solid-State Go-Between

IPS Makes Flexible Use of Lithium

by Bryon Moyer

June 4, 2012

It’s roughly the size of a postage stamp. (Yes, postage stamps come in various sizes, as does this.) It’s thin (0.17 mm) and flexible. It contains no liquid; it contains no organics; nothing hazardous. Oh, and it can store energy: as manufactured, up to 32 joules. It has no memory effect; it’s “infinitely” rechargeable and can support trickle-charging. And it has extremely low leakage.

This is the description of the technology that Infinite Power Solutions (IPS) showed off way back at ESC (or Design West) for their Thinergy batteries. It’s based on solid-state thin-film technology, … Read More → "Solid-State Go-Between"