Articles – Page 31

Microchip, PolarFire, and the Imperative of the Intelligent Edge

November 14, 2023

My poor old noggin is currently spinning like a top. I was just chatting with Shakeel Peera, who is VP of Marketing, Strategy, and Business Operations for the FPGA business unit at Microchip Technology.

The first piece of intelligence that blew my mind was the fact that the FPGA business unit is one of 23 business units inside Microchip. Give me strength. I remember when Microchip started as a relatively small spin-off … Read More → "Microchip, PolarFire, and the Imperative of the Intelligent Edge"

Prophesee’s 5th Generation Sensors Detect Motion Instead of Images for Industrial, Robotic, and Consumer Applications

by Steven Leibson

November 13, 2023

British photographer Eadward Muybridge’s pioneering work on motion pictures in the 1870s and his invention of the zoopraxiscope to display moving images literally framed everything that followed for the next 150 years, first in movies, then in television, and finally in animated GIFs. Muybridge’s developments leveraged human persistence of vision to make the subjects in a sequence of still photos appear to be moving. Since then, all cinema and video recordings have been based on projecting still image frames in rapid succession. That mechanism is great for capturing motion-picture scenes to be reproduced for human visual … Read More → "Prophesee’s 5th Generation Sensors Detect Motion Instead of Images for Industrial, Robotic, and Consumer Applications"

Winbond’s CUBE Memory Is Anything but Square

by Max Maxfield

November 9, 2023

Do you remember those dim and distant days when the term AI (artificial intelligence) wasn’t on everybody’s lips? I’m aware that researchers and academics have been beavering away on AI since the Dartmouth Workshop in the summer of 1956, but for decades their labors rarely impinged on the public’s collective consciousness.

Admittedly, the topic of Expert Systems did raise its ugly head circa the 1990s, but these little scamps rarely managed to live up to the marketing … Read More → "Winbond’s CUBE Memory Is Anything but Square"

AMD develops Virtex UltraScale+ FPGA with low-latency Ethernet for its Alveo UL3524 fintech accelerator card

by Steven Leibson

November 8, 2023

AMD has announced an FPGA-based accelerator card with ultra-low-latency Ethernet ports, specifically designed for high-frequency financial trading. Like all such cards, the Alveo UL3524 accelerator card pairs an FPGA with several high-speed, low-latency Ethernet ports, which terminate in four QSFP-DD cages. Each QSFP-DD cage is driven by eight GTF TX/RX transceiver pairs that terminate in the FPGA. The important specification for this card is the low Ethernet transceiver latency, which AMD claims is less than 3ns, which AMD … Read More → "AMD develops Virtex UltraScale+ FPGA with low-latency Ethernet for its Alveo UL3524 fintech accelerator card"

Microchip’s Newest 8-bit, 14/20-pin MCU Adopts I3C Bus for 2-Pin Interfaces to High-Speed Devices

by Steven Leibson

November 6, 2023

Microchip has just announced the PIC18-Q20 family of 8-bit microcontrollers (MCUs) that feature larger program and data spaces, an I2C peripheral block and one or two I3C peripheral blocks, very low pin counts, and packages as small as 3×3 mm. These devices are available in 14- and 20-pin packages with 16 to 64 Kbytes of on-chip Flash memory for program storage, 1 to 4 Kbytes of on-chip SRAM for data storage, and 256 bytes of EEPROM located in the program-memory address space for non-volatile data storage, including network and security keys and calibration constants. Currently, there are six devices … Read More → "Microchip’s Newest 8-bit, 14/20-pin MCU Adopts I3C Bus for 2-Pin Interfaces to High-Speed Devices"

Are We Ready for the 2nm Process Node?

by Max Maxfield

November 2, 2023

I’m a simple man. We could stop this column here and call it a day, but mayhap you were expecting more. Oh well if you insist. As you are doubtless aware, there’s a lot of buzz about the forthcoming 2nm process node, but what does this term actually mean in the real world? Ah, therein lies the rub, as the Bard might say.

The term “process node” (a.k.a. “process technology,” “technology node,” or just “node”) refers to a specific semiconductor manufacturing process. As part of this, we include a … Read More → "Are We Ready for the 2nm Process Node?"

Lattice announces CrossLinkU-NX FPGA with USB 3.2 to Unlock Video Applications

by Steven Leibson

November 1, 2023

Lattice has marked some new territory in the low-end FPGA market with the CrossLinkU-NX FPGA. While AMD and Intel have signaled renewed interest in this market by previewing the future appearance of the low-end Spartan UltraScale+ and Agilex 3 families respectively, Lattice has been busy rolling out new members of its low-end CrossLink family. The latest addition, called the CrossLinkU-NX FPGA, specifically targets video applications for the industrial and automation markets, and, even more specifically, targets video applications that communicate to host processors on the edge via USB 3.2.

Like the other … Read More → "Lattice announces CrossLinkU-NX FPGA with USB 3.2 to Unlock Video Applications"

Is This the Future of Chiplet-Based Design?

by Max Maxfield

October 31, 2023

Do you think chiplets are tasty? I think I’ve just seen the future of chiplet-based design—well, one possible future—and it looks finger-licking good to me. Just to make sure we are all tap-dancing to the same skirl of the bagpipes, let’s start by setting the scene. For the purposes of these discussions, we will take the term integrated circuit (IC) to refer to a honking big ASIC, ASSP, SoC… that sort of thing.

A monolithic IC is one that is built on a single piece of … Read More → "Is This the Future of Chiplet-Based Design?"

Spectacular Spintronics (Mechanical Electronics) Now Available Worldwide

by Max Maxfield

October 30, 2023

It seems like a lifetime away that my chum Paul Boswell and his wife Alyssa launched their Spintronics Kickstarter. I just checked through the archives to discover that I last wrote about this on 20 May 2021. “O-M-G,” is all I can say. Where does the time go?

Getting Spintronics up and running took a lot more effort than was originally anticipated (all this was detailed in the numerous Kickstarter updates). Once everything was tickety-boo, Paul and Alyssa—in the form of … Read More → "Spectacular Spintronics (Mechanical Electronics) Now Available Worldwide"

What? NOR Flash Just Got Even Sexier?

by Max Maxfield

October 26, 2023

As you may have gathered from my recent Logic Diagrams and Machines column, I spend more time than perhaps I should cogitating and ruminating on the past, pondering the imponderable and effing the ineffable. One of the topics I often contemplate is what would happen if I inadvertently wandered into a timeslip and found myself transported back to the late 1930s or early 1940s (my uncle was never the same after it happened to him).

We discussed some … Read More → "What? NOR Flash Just Got Even Sexier?"