Articles – Page 240

March 19, 2012

There is a story in the American South about two “country boys” who walk into a lumber yard and ask to buy some wood. The lumber yard attendant asks what size they want. They look confused. He gives them some choices “two-by-fours, two-by-sixes, four-by-fours…”

They step aside for a minute to confer with each other. “We’ll take two-by-fours.”

The lumber yard attendant takes them to the aisle with the two-by-fours. “How long do you need them?”

The two step aside to … Read More → "Designing for the Long Haul"

SimCity Sure Isn’t Bespin

Cloud-based Gaming Makes a Bad Situation Worse

by Jim Turley

March 14, 2012

If you’re one of my ten-million or so fellow “mayors” of SimCity, you haven’t had a good week. Apparently getting handed the key to your own city isn’t enough. We can still get locked out.

If you haven’t been struggling with Electronic Arts’ latest $60 time sink, perhaps you’ve read the headlines. The new-for-2013 version of the popular game SimCity was released just a few days ago – and promptly crashed. Not “crashed” in the sense of making your PC slow down or display the blue screen of death, but crashed as in you … Read More → "SimCity Sure Isn’t Bespin"

ARMing Embedded

by Dick Selwood

March 14, 2012

While the rest of the world, with some minor exceptions, is seeing decline in trade shows/exhibitions etc, embedded world, in Nürnberg, Germany, continues to grow and grow. At the opening day, the organisers were cautiously predicting that they would exceed 20,000 visitors: in the post- show press release, they were triumphantly proclaiming 17% visitor growth, to 22,262, and 872 exhibitors, 9% growth. And this doesn’t include the 1,000 final-year engineering degree students on student day that the organisers bussed in from all over Germany.

The downside of all of this is that the halls are very … Read More → "ARMing Embedded"

Shipping the Future

Altera’s 28nm FPGAs Hit the Streets

by Kevin Morris

March 13, 2012

Altera announced this week that production shipments of their high-performance Stratix V 28nm FPGAs have begun. While we’ve been talking for a couple of years now about all the advantages that the 28nm node will bring to the FPGA landscape, this announcement is probably the most important sign that the rubber is actually meeting the road when it comes to delivering those benefits to the world.

In the FPGA market, vendors begin bragging about their new device families LONG before they’re available to the public. There are a couple of reasons for this. … Read More → "Shipping the Future"

Truth in Randomness

Practical Insights on Randomness, the Nature of the Universe, and Using Ring Oscillators as Entropy Sources for High-Security Applications

by Amelia Dalton

March 12, 2012

Most engineers will be able to get through an entire career without having to think about the mathematical realities that underlie the principles of randomness and entropy—even though many use or design applications that rely on them to ensure the security of their interactions. For the most part, engineers simply take the vendor’s specifications at face value when incorporating the cryptography hardware (and the code that supports it) into designs. Unfortunately, some recent discoveries about the more subtle and not-well-documented characteristics of random noise sources have … Read More → "Truth in Randomness"

Are RTOSes Dead?

by Bryon Moyer

March 12, 2012

The world no longer needs RTOSes. Linux can do it all.

Or so it was suggested at the recent RTECC conference, where none other than renowned embedded Linux booster Jim Ready of MontaVista (now Cavium) gave a presentation suggesting that, at this point, there is really no need for anything but Linux.

While that seemed more extreme than I had been thinking, this coincided with some mulling I had been doing as to whether the role of RTOSes was changing. It provided a perfect opportunity to check in with a couple of RTOS guys to … Read More → "Are RTOSes Dead?"

Reducing Power Consumption and Increasing Bandwidth on 28nm FPGAs (REVISED)

by Bryon Moyer

March 8, 2012

Lower power consumption and higher bandwidth are now the two dominant requirements in designing next-generation high-end applications. The global trend across multiple markets is for higher bandwidth in the same footprint at the same or lower power and cost. The Internet is going mobile and video is driving bandwidth requirements at a growth rate of 50% year on year. The march to 40G and 100G systems (with 400G on the horizon) is underway to support this ever-growing bandwidth demand. Fierce competition is driving down prices. Space constraints abound, and cooling solutions often dominate … Read More → "Reducing Power Consumption and Increasing Bandwidth on 28nm FPGAs (REVISED)"

A Bigger Packet Pipe

Cavium Announces OCTEON III

by Bryon Moyer

March 7, 2012

Multicore is familiar territory in the communications world. That application area is arguably where the most sophisticated multicore practitioners operate. Unlike other embedded areas, like cellphones – if, that is, you consider them embedded, and which are just starting to use more than one core in a real multicore way, communications infrastructure designers have been using several cores for a long time.

The reason is simple: speed. You’ve got packets flying at you at a bazillion gigaspams per second and you’ … Read More → "A Bigger Packet Pipe"

MATLAB to Hardware

MathWorks Automates HDL Creation

by Kevin Morris

March 6, 2012

Quick! What’s the fourth largest EDA company in the world? Most of us in the industry can rattle off the “Big 3” right? “Daisy, Mentor, Valid.” Oops, my time machine was off by about 30 years. How about “Synopsys, Mentor, Cadence”? After that, it gets a bit dicey – if we counted Magma, that would be a possibility, but we need to chalk them up to Synopsys now. For those of us who think FPGA companies are actually EDA companies with a different business model, Xilinx and Altera would be in the top four … Read More → "MATLAB to Hardware"

EUV Gets Closer to Hitting the Mark

by Bryon Moyer

March 5, 2012

It was one of the main themes at this year’s SPIE Litho conference: what are the alternatives to extreme UV lithography?

This question was based on the perennial frustration with getting enough EUV source power to be useful. We looked at the challenges and goals last year, but the discussion in that case focused most specifically on Xtreme’s laser-assisted discharge plasma (LDP) approach, a kind of hybrid … Read More → "EUV Gets Closer to Hitting the Mark"