Designing for military and aerospace applications can be tough sometimes. The other designers – you know, the ones that do commercial applications – can have the pick of any cool technology they want to use. If some new femtowatt terahertz nanodollar FPGA rolls off the fab line, those commercial designer kids can grab it and go. You, on the other hand, have to stick with only devices that are certified, proven, specially packaged, and … old. It’s like they’re going out on dates in their Dad’s new Porsche or Ferrari while you can either drive your own Citroen deaux … Read More → "Xilinx Strengthens Its Defenses"

Mentor brought us Leonardo, Precision, ModelSim, and Catapult. Synopsys sells Synplify and HAPS. Magma brought us Palace and Blast FPGA. Big EDA companies have had anything from a toenail to a whole leg dangling in the FPGA pool for years now… except Cadence.

Like a politician skillfully skirting a controversial issue, Cadence deftly danced around the FPGA domain without touching – one big boot in the IC/ASIC design world, and another firmly planted at the board/system level – with the word “FPGA” never crossing their lips.  When you were designing a board with your Cadence tools, … Read More → "Cadence Uses the F Word"

Many project teams move from ASICs to FPGAs to avoid high NRE costs, and to reduce the risk of re-spin and shorten time-to-market. But while FPGA technology offers these advantages, the development process itself requires equal attention. In fact, some ASIC/ASSP proponents argue that a large part of the design cost is incurred during the development phases including architectural exploration, design, and verification, thereby reducing the cost savings and time-to-market benefits of switching from ASICs to FPGAs.

For this reason, executives and project managers need to carefully consider their concept-to-PCB development approach. Is the process predictable, … Read More → "Need to Cut Cost, Risk, Time?"

Many times, we create a new technology with the knowledge that it has tremendous potential but without a clear idea of how it will ultimately be used. Or, we create a solution to one problem only to find later that our invention was even more useful in some completely different area. We throw our new creation out to the public and are amazed when someone comes up with a far more clever way to use it than we had ever envisioned.

This may be the case with Actel’s “Fusion” family of analog-capable FPGAs.  Sure, the … Read More → "Fusion Finds its Groove"