Articles – Page 501

August 4, 2009

“The coldest winter I saw was the summer I spent in San Francisco,” quipped Mark Twain. It’s good to know some things never change. The City by the Bay (or simply “The City” to those within driving distance) didn’t disappoint, as the comforting midsummer fog enshrouded nerds from near and far. Grab an Irish coffee and hop aboard the cable car; it must be time for the 46th annual Design Automation Conference.

San Francisco is practically an island, surrounded on three sides by … Read More → "DAC Cetera"

Getting Your Clock Cleaned

by Bryon Moyer

August 4, 2009

Power reduction continues to ride high on the hit parade, with companies of all shapes and sizes attacking it from numerous angles. We’ve taken a sampling of various techniques before, at both the& … Read More → "Getting Your Clock Cleaned"

Parallel Cores and C

A New Approach to Field Programmability

by Dick Selwood

July 28, 2009

Did you hear the story about the fabless semiconductor company that began shipping a family of 10 different devices within months of being founded?

Or the story about the company that developed and shipped a USB 2.0 High Speed device endpoint, supporting multiple audio channels with DSP audio enhancement, in not much more than a couple of months?

Or the company that claims to offer a field programmable device that can be designed in days, programmed in seconds, has a sleep mode of less than 500μW and a selling price of under $5?

Better, Stronger, Faster

Samsung’s 1-GHz ARM

by Jim Turley

July 28, 2009

If you’re into fast 32-bit processors, Samsung is announcing a new ARM-based chip that runs at 1 GHz. That in itself is interesting, but what’s more remarkable is how the chip got so fast.

ARM-based processors are generally known for their small size and power efficiency, not their speed. That Samsung was able to make its ARM A8 device run at 1 GHz is something of a milestone.

It’s also remarkable because Samsung didn’t actually make its chip run at 1 GHz. Instead, it farmed out the design … Read More → "Better, Stronger, Faster"

Taming Process Development

Process Relations Attempts to Minimize Experiments

by Bryon Moyer

July 28, 2009

– You mean we’ve got to do another run?

– Yeah, we decided we didn’t quite check enough temperature points, so we’ve got one more experiment here optimizing that.

Hardware Innovation is Dead

Long Live Software Innovation!

by Dick Selwood

July 21, 2009

Back in the days of the dot-com boom, I used to go to processor conferences several times a year. Every one of these events was packed full of wild and wacky hardware innovations. Nobody had more ideas than FPGA designers. In a remarkably short period of time, FPGAs were transformed from generic “sea of gates” devices into complex SoCs. They added more and more hardwired features: memory, DSP blocks, high-speed I/O, and even processor cores.

As if this weren’t enough, FPGAs made dramatic improvements in power and cost. Some … Read More → "Hardware Innovation is Dead"

Mixing it Right for Mixed Signal

by Bryon Moyer

July 21, 2009

Clearly there is a real and growing demand for mixed-signal devices. Technology advances are ensuring high-performance analog-rich designs can be fabricated more cost effectively. The inexorable shift to smaller geometries on standard digital CMOS processes has encouraged more foundries to exploit still-viable, larger nodes for mixed-signal processes. Meanwhile, other foundries, entirely focused on mixed-signal, are developing new BiCMOS, RF CMOS and SiGe processes. Production capacity and process choice for mixed signal devices is increasing to meet growing demand. Variations for low power, low voltage, high voltage and high frequency provide plenty of choice for the discerning mixed signal device … Read More → "Mixing it Right for Mixed Signal"

At the Dawn of the Universe

Tales from the World of System Bring-up

by Bryon Moyer

July 21, 2009

We take a lot for granted in this world. When we got here, stuff was more or less just working. We’ve managed to bend a lot of that to our will since then, and we’ve done so by mastering a wide variety of reliable physical laws. We’ve managed to destroy some of it (and threaten to destroy more) often because we have not yet mastered yet more of those laws (or because someone could make a quick buck, but that’s a different topic). We live in a universe that has the … Read More → "At the Dawn of the Universe"

Facts & Figures

by Jim Turley

July 21, 2009

It’s a slow news day here at Embedded Technology Journal, so we’re taking this summertime opportunity to review a bit of our world by numbers. Perhaps some of these illuminating factoids will give you some good business ideas. Or just help you win a bar bet.

• According to Microsoft’s own research conducted as it was developing Vista, the second most-popular computer activity is playing games. In terms of time spent in front of the computer, the only thing that trumps games is surfing the … Read More → "Facts & Figures"

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Aldec Makes Waves with Mixed-Language Simulation

by Kevin Morris

July 14, 2009

Aldec is offering a full-blown, mixed-language HDL simulator for $1995.

It might seem strange to have a feature article about a price reduction. After all, we don’t usually see a story come across the AP newswire with a headline like “Heirloom Tomatoes on Sale for $2.99/lb.” The price of commodity items is well understood to be the product of a magic brew that includes supply, demand, manufacturing and shipping costs, package design, and a host of other intangibles – hardly newsworthy.

So, why is this interesting?

There are two reasons.

< … Read More →