Alpe d’Huez loomed large ahead.  His team had been supporting and protecting him until now, keeping him squarely in the running for the yellow jersey.  Today, however, he’d have to prove himself on his own – without the benefit of the drag-reducing veil of his teammates’ slipstream shadow.  Years of training, and it all came down to this – the classic weed-out mountain stage of the tour.

The unruly crowd cheered, and the adrenaline went straight to his soul.  He felt like he was flying up the hill.& … Read More → "The Right Equipment"

How often has it happened that you have just finished a complex module for an FPGA project only to later find out that a very similar module was completed a month earlier by another team within the company? Not only have you just wasted several weeks of your time, but this wasted time has also cost the company money. A quick way to become a hero by saving the company both time and money is to put in place a simple reuse repository to prevent this scenario from ever happening again.

Today many design teams and companies … Read More → "Building an FPGA Design Repository"

In classical music, they are the organists.

My brother, an accomplished professional trumpet player, had just completed a performance for solo piccolo trumpet and organ.  I was looking at his immaculately maintained instrument and noticed that one of the tuning slides was so light, it seemed it could just fall off the horn if the performer held it at the wrong angle.

“What would you do if this fell off during a performance?” I asked.

Seemingly without thinking, he replied “Oh, the organist would catch it and replace it.& … Read More → "Renaissance FAEs"

A few years ago when SERDES became available on FPGAs, they were exotic. Both for the FPGA guys and for their users. The FPGA guys had to learn how all this stuff worked, tune the (relatively) complicated analog circuits, and make it all function. Those were some of the last features to be officially released on those devices because they just took longer to get right. More than one customer was stranded waiting for parts with working high-speed I/Os.

Meanwhile, there weren’t a lot of customers who knew what to do with this stuff. … Read More → "Two Chips Or One?"