Articles – Page 517

New Chips Don’t Suck (Power)

September 15, 2009

Within a week, Intel and Freescale both announced new high-end embedded processors. They’re both packed with multicore processors, DRAM controllers, and PCI Express interfaces. But, for all their similarities, they couldn’t be more different.

In this corner, we have Freescale’s new P1022, the sixth member of the QorIQ family. And in this corner, we have “Jasper Forest,” a mostly new family of chips from Intel. Both are more power-efficient than their predecessors, though, in one case, that’s not saying much. And both are well-supported with software … Read More → "New Chips Don’t Suck (Power)"

Your Boss’s Birthday Present

The Linley Group FPGA Report

by Kevin Morris

September 8, 2009

Flexible, powerful, and misunderstood, FPGAs are an admittedly enigmatic technology. Like the proverbial elephant amidst the blind men, the topic of FPGAs can produce a different view from every perspective – technology, applications, design tools, business… Sit down with a non-peer to have a conversation about FPGAs and you may end up wishing you were discussing something a little less controversial – like healthcare in the United States, perhaps.

Because of their inherent flexibility, FPGAs address a wide variety of problems in a number of different markets and application areas. In each of those areas, each FPGA vendor … Read More → "Your Boss’s Birthday Present"

Small Form Factor Boards and COM

by Dick Selwood

September 8, 2009

Do you know your Micro-ATX from your COM Micro? Or your Qseven from your XTX? The small form factor arena is one of those areas where it is very easy to get lost in the jargon, and, unless you are an enthusiast (and, if you are, then please forgive me), it can be very hard to get excited.

There are at least 150 different sizes and shapes for small form factor boards, according to expert (and enthusiast) Hermann Strass. And there seem to be almost as many organisations working in the area. As well as organisations like … Read More → "Small Form Factor Boards and COM"

Attack of the Merger Machine

by Jim Turley

September 8, 2009

I lost money on the stock market again this week.

The companies in question are ARC International and Virage Logic, both purveyors of silicon IP. That is to say, they don’t make anything, but they do help IC designers make stuff. [Full disclosure: the author was Vice President of Marketing and Technology Strategy for ARC International from 1999 through 2001.] The acquisition is a good thing for the industry and for IC designers (shareholders notwithstanding) and highlights a couple of big trends in this business.

Combining Formal Verification With Simulation

You Can Have Your Cake and Eat it Too!

by Bryon Moyer

September 8, 2009

It is well known that formal verification offers exhaustive proofs of correctness and can help find deep corner case bugs. Verification engineers have typically relegated its use to block-level designs, preferring to use simulation, the tried and tested workhorse, for chip-level and full-chip verification. The very strength of formal verification, namely its exhaustiveness, is also its Achilles heel in that with design size growth, formal engines run out of steam due to state space explosion. Simulation, on the other hand, scales well with design size and doesn’t suffer the same fate as formal verification.

Linux or Commercial OS?

by Dick Selwood

September 8, 2009

Watching the season premiere of “Mad Men” last week got me thinking about hair styles and those skinny neckties of the early ’60s. Exactly what is fashionable? Ask that question today among embedded software developers, and you’re bound to get a simple, straightforward answer: Android. And while Android rightly deserves much of the attention, it’s not the “be-all, end-all” of operating systems in use today.

No doubt there’s been a lot of noise and enthusiasm for Linux and Android. In fact, many developers viewed the rise … Read More → "Linux or Commercial OS?"

Seven Steps to an Accurate Worst-Case Power Analysis Using Xilinx Power Estimator (XPE)

by Jim Turley

September 2, 2009

Seven Steps to an Accurate Power Estimation

As a necessary step in any FPGA design, power and cooling specifications need to be properly set in order to create a functioning and reliable system. In most cases, these thermal and power specifications need to be set prior to PCB design and, due to the flexibility of FPGAs, often the FPGA design is not completed or sometimes even started prior … Read More → "Seven Steps to an Accurate Worst-Case Power Analysis Using Xilinx Power Estimator (XPE)"

AES and Antifuses

FPGA Security

by Dick Selwood

September 1, 2009

You bring a new product to market, and, within weeks, a rival appears, one that is clearly a rip-off of your design: not just looking like yours or performing much the same functions, but actually a clone of your design. There are shed-loads of statistics that show that the problem is increasing within the electronics industry and a mass of anecdotal evidence that indicates that designs using FPGAs are being increasingly targeted.

As FPGAs have moved from simply mopping up glue-logic to becoming full-blown Systems on Chip (SoCs), so they now embody the key Intellectual Property (IP) … Read More → "AES and Antifuses"

Dante Enters a New Field

Or, is this Heaven or Hell?

by Bryon Moyer

September 1, 2009

Dante would feel right at home surveying the math required to create useful circuits. He might meet some argument as to whether he was observing hell or heaven, but there would be no disagreement on the levels one would encounter as one approached the deepest depths or highest heights.

At the first level, one finds the easy world of ones and zeros. George Boole governs this domain, and he holds dominion over a disproportionate swath of the landscape. Moving in a level brings us to the simple world of conservative law passive circuits. Voltage and current sources, … Read More → "Dante Enters a New Field"

Courage Under Fire Drill

Surviving Interruptions

by Bryon Moyer

September 1, 2009

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