Articles – Page 272

Faster Troubleshooting And Fault Isolation With In-System Diagnostics

March 16, 2011

Troubleshooting and quickly isolating faults is of tremendous value for reducing the time to redesign or repair failing boards. This paper describes how using an interpreter that allows the execution of a full test suite for verifying a design or an individual test for fault isolation can dramatically improve quality and reliability with In-System Diagnostics. It describes how memory errors can be isolated to ECC, single-bit, row, column, and correlated to a part’s reference designator. Also how the debug engineer can have control over the test parameters … Read More → "Faster Troubleshooting And Fault Isolation With In-System Diagnostics"

Team Player

Xilinx 13.1 Livens the Party

by Kevin Morris

March 15, 2011

Witness the recent announcements by a number of EDA companies – Altium, Synopsys, and others – touting team design enhancements in their tools. With their latest ISE release – ISE 13.1 – Xilinx is joining that group with a major set of improvements for multi-engineer FPGA projects.

Team design has been around for a long time, of course. Since the beginning of engineering, engineers have been collaborating on large projects. But FPGAs have still often been one-man shows, where the FPGA part of the large project was primarily the job of one member of the team. Now, … Read More → "Team Player"

What’s Yours Is Mine

MRAPI Lets You Manage Embedded Resources

by Bryon Moyer

March 14, 2011

Arrrr, Captain, we’re abeam o’ the port now. When do we start the shellin’ and the pillagin’ and the mayhem?

Now, just hold yer fire there, hotpants, we’ve got three ships in this here operation, and I don’t want no one with a fidgety trigger finger jumpin’ the gun, ya hear? And, before ya do, I’ll say it now: don’t ya be criticizin’ me mixed metafers.

Arrr, aye aye Captain. Oh, and we spotted an … Read More → "What’s Yours Is Mine"

28Gbps Serial Transceiver Technology (HD 1920×1080)

by Bryon Moyer

March 11, 2011

If you need to stream data at 100, 200 or 400 gigabits per second, check this out: 16 channels at 28 gigabits each gives you 400 gigabits of capacity. Need more?

The Virtex-7 HT FPGA can deliver an additional 72 channels at 13 gigabits each. The bi-direction data … Read More → "28Gbps Serial Transceiver Technology (HD 1920×1080)"

Hardware Programmability

by Amelia Dalton

March 11, 2011

Learn how FPGAs allow you to customize for your specific needs while enabling you to protect your differentiation in the marketplace.

… Read More →

Mapping Out Research in Northern Europe

A High-Level Look at IMEC

by Bryon Moyer

March 10, 2011

There’s a large technology organization in Europe that doesn’t sell anything tangible. In fact, it’s not a commercial entity at all. And yet they create press releases by the dozens. On any given morning, I may hear the rattle and thump of five or six releases falling into my email inbox like so many library books tumbling through the return chute.

And they cover all manner of topics. All of them leading-edge process related, but, other than that, they can be all over the map. And there are too many to … Read More → "Mapping Out Research in Northern Europe"

Too Big to Fail

by Jim Turley

March 9, 2011

Intel’s Itanium chip is 10 years old. Ten years of designing and building one of the biggest, fastest, and most complex microprocessors ever made. And 10 years of making excuses for it, too. For Itanium has been a colossal disappointment, not to say embarrassment, for the chip company. It was intended to upend the whole microprocessor industry and finally spell the end of the hated x86. Instead, here we are 10 years on, and Intel is selling more x86 chips than ever while support for Itanium, which was always a bit meager, continues to wane.

What went wrong? … Read More → "Too Big to Fail"

Passing the Prototyping Torch

Tribal Knowledge from Synopsys and Xilinx

by Kevin Morris

March 8, 2011

You might think FPGA companies wouldn’t care much about people doing FPGA-based prototypes. After all, these aren’t the people that design an FPGA into their product and then buy a bazillion for manufacturing use. They buy a single-digit number of big parts, and they’re set.

You might also think that EDA companies wouldn’t be all fired up to support FPGA-based prototypers either. After all, aside from a few prototyping boards, and maybe some partitioning software, what do they stand to gain by making the prototyper … Read More → "Passing the Prototyping Torch"

Mini-Meter

Modeling the Power Minutiae of your Chip

by Bryon Moyer

March 7, 2011

Think of it as scaling down a smart meter.

We used to characterize the power into our homes with one number per month. OK, two: the kWH and the price. One might stay the same month to month, the other goes up.

For reasons of power optimization – managing and reducing the amount of power we take off the grid – we are moving into the smart meter world. (Well, except for a few areas around here where they’ve instituted moratoria due to the purported falling of the sky.) Now we can characterize & … Read More → "Mini-Meter"

Only 10 Days to Shipping … We May Have a Memory Problem!

by Bryon Moyer

March 7, 2011

How many times have you been in a situation working with a new system where the board bring-up occurred without any major problems manifesting themselves (hey, it could happen)? Initially, everything seems to work just fine. The rudimentary diagnostic tests provided by the hardware guys indicate that all is as it should be. The application software appears to be working as planned. The customer ship date is fast approaching. Everyone on the team is starting to feel confident… but suddenly… with only a few days to go… everything grinds to … Read More → "Only 10 Days to Shipping … We May Have a Memory Problem!"