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?"

Picture this architecture – a high speed application processor doing control coupled to an accelerator comprised of a mass of processing elements ready to power-parallelize compute-intensive components of a complex problem.  Sound familiar?  Supercomputers have taken advantage of acceleration using schemes like this for a while.  People using FPGAs for co-processors do it all the time.

Now, picture a new chip with 1.4 billion transistors, an array of 240 cores, and a processing throughput equivalent to about 1 TeraFLOPS.  Many readers of this publication would probably guess a new FPGA, right? 

With the … Read More → "A Passel of Processors"

Today’s high-capacity and high-performance FPGA designs are becoming more complex and require more third-party intellectual property (IP) cores. These hard IP blocks include pecialized high-speed multi-gigabit transceiver (MGT) I/O cores, PCI Express cores, clock management modules, FIFOs and complex processor cores, such as the PPC440 in the Virtex5 device. The DSP clock management cores (DCMs), BlockRAMs, and FIFO models are in a class of Hard IP cores provided in standard libraries because the simulation models do not require source code protection. However, the other class of Hard IP cores, which includes MGT I/O cores, PCI … Read More → "Performance Improvements with New Secure IP and FAST Simulation Mode Models"

It used to be so simple. PLDs provided a medium by which you could create and modify logic without having to make any board changes. All the variability was on the inside; the outside consisted of I/Os, and, back in the day, that meant one thing: TTL. Eventually, when CMOS became more prevalent, the less-often-used rail-to-rail CMOS interface was available, but those I/Os were on different devices that were dedicated to the CMOS low-power market.

Well, the first hints that the age of innocence was coming to an end appeared with … Read More → "Employing an I/O Interlocutor"