We always thought we knew how it would go down.

Under cover of darkness, our black-clad insertion team would rappel down the walls of the super-secret Xilinx fortress in the desert.  With the kind of precision timing and teamwork found only in movies and editorial feature introductions, we’d scan the perimeter and locate the vulnerable point.  A diamond-tipped drill bit driven by a silent motor would bore a hole just large enough for our fiber-optic viewing tool, and the telling video would be immediately beamed back to FPGA Journal headquarters.  At the … Read More → "Not Bad Die"

New process nodes have a predictable rhythm.  Until about 90nm, we knew before anybody announced anything that we’d get double the density, half the power (dynamic, of course), and 50% more speed than we had in the previous generation.  Of course, that made waiting for the announcements from semiconductor companies a little less than suspenseful.  Our Moore’s Law alarm clock would beep on its two-year cycle.  We’d check to see if anybody had announced the thing we were expecting yet, and then we’d hit the one-month snooze button … Read More → "40nm Altera Stratix IV"

Everyone knows that if you want to do things slowly, you do them one at a time. If you want to get more done, you get more people to help do things in parallel. Right? I mean, in the world of electronics, think “serial,” and what might come to mind is the slow, stately procession of bits plodding from your desktop to some not-very-needy peripheral. You want speed? Check out the parallel port, where multiple lines are willing and able to deliver the kind of data demanded by your more high-maintenance attention-craving peripherals.

Read More → "High-Speed Serial Comes to the Analog/Digital Divide"

The countdown counter/timer circuit was pretty trivial to code up in VHDL.  My dev board had an old FPGA on it, but it didn’t matter.  The original version of my little design probably used less than 10% of the chip anyway.  I’d enhanced it several times, of course.  The original one loaded a big number into the register and then counted down.  When the countdown reached zero, an audio-frequency square wave was generated at an output pin.  A little amplifier circuit took the digital signal and ran it straight … Read More → "Golden Hammer"