Embedded Systems Conference 2007 in San Jose has ended, but we have devised a devious database of alphabetically arranged alliterative announcements to alleviate any anxiety you might feel from foregoing this fabulous event and thus missing out on the embedded action from an FPGA perspective.  Rather than rely on a plethora of press releases flying in formation, we’ve condensed the conference into a laundry list of simplified summaries – ready for the pleasure of your perusal.

Actel – addresses the audience in association with ARM – announcing the creative new Cortex-M1 core – custom created for FPGA.& … Read More → "ABCs of ESC"

Power, Price, and Performance – in the old days, every new click of Moore’s law gave us all three, automatically.  Shrink the gates and you can fit more of ‘em in the same space, they switch faster, and you can drop your supply voltage, saving power.  As we passed down into double-digit nanometers, however, we started having to compromise more.  Now, we have to pick just two out of the three “Ps” of Moore’s Law.

Altera is perfectly content with that state of affairs, as they have … Read More → "Cyclone III"

Introduction

Incremental design is a useful capability when implemented properly. Unfortunately, due to the naming schemes employed by logic synthesis tools, confusion arises over what in the design has actually changed. What is needed is an algorithm that deterministically creates names for generated logic elements, simplifying the task of correctly identifying what has changed at each cycle.

For the incremental design flow illustrated in Figure 1 to be most effective, minor changes should be made to the design at each incremental turn to allow the reuse of the place-and-route data generated during the previous … Read More → "Deterministic Name Generation for Incremental Synthesis"

The wild winds of winter have ravaged the technology plains with bitter cold, their icy breath wearing thin the layer of protective press releases lovingly laid down to protect the crops during the dormant days of digital design.   Groggy-headed marketers return from Maui and the extra-worldly environment of their sales kickoff events to face the bleak reality of product releases awaiting their magic touch.  The frozen pond of high-tech public relations may look barren today, but a barrage of activity blossoms just beneath the surface.  The technology universe, too, is tilted on its axis, and … Read More → "The First FPGAs of Spring"

FPGAs, possibly the most powerful processors in existence today by many measures, were never intended to be processors at all. Conceived as general-purpose programmable logic devices, their simple arrays of logic elements were not designed to accelerate computationally intensive tasks. Instead, they fell into the role in a Rube-Goldbergian fashion – evolving their processing prowess over a decade or more with engineering’s version of emergent behavior rather than ground-up purposeful design.

Today, FPGAs are used in many applications for heavy lifting chores such as video processing, often paired with conventional processors charged with handling the … Read More → "DSP to a Different Drummer"