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HFame Academy for Engineers?

The problem exists in all areas of electronics, from EDA through manufacturing to system developers, and in most geographical markets. It regularly crops up in conversations and seems to be part of a general trend away from Science/Engineering/Technology in Western countries.

A quick browse around some recent publications shows that a lot of work is going into analysing the problem, but nobody has yet come up with any serious suggestions as to how it can be solved.

For example, IEEE USA’s today’s engineer ran a long piece … Read More → "HFame Academy for Engineers?"

Who Are You People?

Over 60,000 people in over 100 countries read FPGA Journal.

Apparently, you’re one of them.

While we may be the perennial pundits of programmable logic, we don’t deceive ourselves into thinking that FPGAs are some sort of universal unification language.  We do, however, think that programmable devices like FPGAs will be one of the most important technologies in electronic design moving forward.  With the rapid evolution of the global high-tech economy, our position in the FPGA space gives us a fascinating lens through which we can observe and prognosticate about the … Read More → "Who Are You People?"

New Approaches to Long-Term Memory

There’s been a quiet development brewing that you could file under “W” for “What’s old is new.” Non-volatile memory (NVM) is seeing renewed attention as Logic NVM, but with a twist – gone is the requirement for a boutique process. There’s enough activity here to warrant a one-day self-titled convention specifically dedicated to developments and usage (and particularly, quality and reliability). But I’m getting ahead of myself. To understand what’s new, we must understand what’s old.

There … Read More → "New Approaches to Long-Term Memory"

Why Hamsters Cannot Save the Planet

While low power was officially the theme of only a panel session at Globalpress Electronics Summit, it was also frequently the theme, sometimes explicit and frequently implicit, of much of what was discussed.

The most striking performance was by John East of FPGA company, Actel. He spoke mainly from the perspective of the USA, which is probably appropriate, as the US, with around 5% of the world’s population, daily consumes 20.7 million barrels of oil, or 25% of world consumption. “This 20-million-barrel-a-day habit costs $1.4 billion a day,” East said, but that was when oil was at $70 a … Read More → "Why Hamsters Cannot Save the Planet"

The Right Equipment

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"

Fight! Fight! Please?

Everyone loves a good fight. Peace? Harmony? Teach the world to sing? Bah! That’s hippie talk! There’s no excitement (or money) in that! Drama, now that’s what we want! (Some of us even want our own drama, but that’s a separate topic.)

OK, so when it comes to tech, perhaps the drama is less, well, compelling. Yes, we can snicker and leer self-righteously, but when we hold our grandkids in the thrall of stories about how things used to be back when we used wires, … Read More → "Fight! Fight! Please?"

Death, Taxes and Intel

Three things are certain in the engineer’s life: death, taxes, and Intel dominance.

One of those is not actually true. Although “Intel” is the name that comes to mind when the topic turns to microprocessors, the company’s famous chips account for barely 2% of all the microprocessor and microcontroller chips sold each year. (That’s counting units, not dollar value. The revenue picture is quite different.) The other 98% of the world’s microprocessors all come from somewhere else.  

ARM, for example, creates at least five times more 32 … Read More → "Death, Taxes and Intel"

Building an FPGA Design Repository

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"

Renaissance FAEs

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"

Going Back to the Formal

Back a decade or so ago, there was a big hoo-hah about “formal verification.” Things burned hot for a while, then cooled down and more or less slipped away from view for most of us. And some of us may have been left with the impression that it was a good idea, perhaps, theoretically, but that practical realities got in the way of it being broadly useful. Now suddenly formal verification is getting some attention again. Which raises the question, what’s changed?

The first thing we need to tackle is, what does “ … Read More → "Going Back to the Formal"

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