Articles – Page 276

ARM and Microsoft

January 26, 2011

When, at CES, Microsoft announced that the next version of Windows would run on the ARM architecture, it was the signal for a commentators’ feeding frenzy. Many, if not most, of the comments came from people who saw computing as the desk top, thought ARM actually made chips and couldn’t understand that the story wasn’t about taking over from Intel.

One of the most important of the foci of these commentators, and even more for those posting comments on the comments, was the difficulty of moving the truly massive amount of Wintel … Read More → "ARM and Microsoft"

Fun With Family Planning

Altera Details 28nm FPGA and ASIC Families

by Kevin Morris

January 25, 2011

Altera has just released specifics on their upcoming 28nm families, with a data dump that would make Wikileaks proud. At the highest level, there will be four families of devices – three FPGA families and one ASIC (HardCopy) family. The three FPGA families differ in their features, density, and performance, and they target different classes of end applications. The HardCopy V ASIC family offers a cost reduction path and the potential for improving performance and power consumption for Stratix V customers that are headed to higher volumes.

At the high end, we have the already-announced … Read More → "Fun With Family Planning"

A PUF Piece

Revealing Secrets Buried Deep Within Your Silicon

by Bryon Moyer

January 24, 2011

A well-worn literary device in any self-respecting bedtime story ensures us that, no matter how evil the villain, there’s a hidden speck of virtue whereby he or she can achieve redemption.

OK, so I’m not going to go so far as to ascribe literary qualities to these pages, lest credibility be forever lost. But we’re going to take one of the up-and-coming anti-heroes of our time and expose the surprising goodness lurking within.

And who might this beneficent ne’er-do-well be? That infamous processing bugaboo, Read More → "A PUF Piece"

NXP’s Multicore Goes Micro

by Jim Turley

January 18, 2011

Most of us think of multicore processors as a big deal. It’s a high-end architectural trick, designed to get maximum performance from PC and workstation processors. Multicore is big league. Multicore is complicated. Multicore is expensive.

NXP has turned that idea on its head with a line of wee microcontrollers that start at just $2. The company’s LPC4300 family is certainly multicore—it’s even heterogeneous, if you’re into that—but it’s multicore writ small. Mighty mites in the service of mankind, you might say.

Dawn of a New Day

Introducing Electronic Engineering Journal

by Kevin Morris

January 18, 2011

This won’t be your run-of-the-mill FPGA Journal Article. In fact, it won’t be an FPGA Journal article at all…

After seven-and-a-half long years, FPGA Journal will be opening its doors wider. If you’ve followed our history as a publishing company, you’ll know that we started FPGA Journal back in 2003, then followed that with Embedded Technology Journal in 2005 and IC Design and Verification Journal in 2008. Throughout those years, we have grown enormously, and, in 2010, our three publications were read by over 200,000 engineers in (according to Google Analytics, … Read More → "Dawn of a New Day"

Who is Going to Make Your Chip?

by Dick Selwood

January 17, 2011

It used to be that real men had fabs. The small number of companies designing chips also developed their own processes and built fabs for only a few tens of millions of dollars. If they had spare capacity they might also run other peoples’ designs through the fab. The fab price tag got bigger as processes chased Moore’s Law, the industry went through cycles of growth and contraction, and lots more people wanted to make chips. So companies were set up just to make chips. These are the foundries.

They were first used by the fabless … Read More → "Who is Going to Make Your Chip?"

Between an ARM and a Hard Place

Fish Fry - January 14, 2011

by Amelia Dalton

January 14, 2011

In my Fish Fry this week, I examine the new ARM/Microsoft announcement, the squishy ownership of IP in today’s electronic design and how the Verizon iPhone plan will affect smartphone users in the U.S.

Join me for this week’s news wrap-up with my spin on the high-tech news of the week…

If you like the idea of this new series, be sure to drop a comment in the box below. I appreciate all … Read More → "Between an ARM and a Hard Place"

Renesas Electronics Introduces New SoC that Enables Industry-Leading 16-Megapixel Still Image and High-Speed Continuous Shooting for Mobile Phones

by Kevin Morris

January 14, 2011

Dusseldorf, 13th January 2011 – Renesas Electronics, a premier provider of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced the availability of a new system-on-chip (SoC), the CE150, for smartphones and high-end mobile phones. The CE150 delivers industry-leading resolution of 16 megapixels and the ability to capture full-HD video (1920 × 1080 pixels).

The new CE150 SoC is designed to support high-speed continuous image shooting, which is demanded in high-end cameras offering top picture quality. The new SoC features high-speed enhancements including a two-lane MIPI® CSI-2 (see Note 1) high-speed output interface from … Read More → "Renesas Electronics Introduces New SoC that Enables Industry-Leading 16-Megapixel Still Image and High-Speed Continuous Shooting for Mobile Phones"

PCA-6782 SBC with New Intel® Atom™ N455/D525 Raises the Benchmark for Reliability.

by Kevin Morris

January 14, 2011

Irvine, California, Jan 13, 2011 –Advantech, the embedded platform and integration services provider, announces the introduction of a new Intel® Atom™ N455/D525 ISA half-size Single Board Computer (SBC). PCA-6782 features the latest high performance Intel Atom N455/D525 single/dual-core processors which are ideal for embedded applications that required a balance of performance and lower power. The latest Intel Atom single core N455 and dual core D525 processors have an integrated graphic and memory controller (GMCH) all on the same chip. This all-in-one solution enables higher performance and even more power … Read More → "PCA-6782 SBC with New Intel® Atom™ N455/D525 Raises the Benchmark for Reliability."

NXP Announces Industry’s First Integrated CAN Transceiver Microcontroller Solution

by Kevin Morris

January 12, 2011

EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS and SAN JOSE, CA–(Marketwire – January 12, 2011) – NXP Semiconductors (NASDAQ: NXPI) today announced the LPC11C22 and LPC11C24 — the industry’s first integrated high-speed CAN Physical Layer transceiver and microcontroller with easy-to-use on-chip CANopen drivers. Offered as a unique System-in-Package solution, the LPC11C22 and LPC11C24 with integrated TJF1051 CAN transceiver combine complete CAN functionality into a low-cost LQFP48 package.

CAN is recognized as a robust and reliable communication channel for rugged environments. With the introduction of the LPC11C22 and … Read More → "NXP Announces Industry’s First Integrated CAN Transceiver Microcontroller Solution"