Articles – Page 548

April 22, 2008

Edgar was seldom in the office – even before the current trends in telecommuting and working from home exploded. He’d waltz through the cube aisles looking important at least once or twice per week – tossing a gigantic notebook with DRAFT stamped on the top onto the desk of some unsuspecting victim. The target would immediately activate his defenses – talking about how he was behind on his part of the project and was almost critical path right now. Edgar wasn’t fazed. Sure, reviewing this draft of the spec might impact … Read More → "The Spirit of Standardization"

Merging with Agility

Alliance Unlocks FPGA Potential

by Kevin Morris

April 22, 2008

We’ve talked many times about the potential of FPGAs in providing incredible amounts of the Good kind of power (computing) while consuming comparatively tiny amounts of the Bad kind of power (“juice”). When you want a lot of numbers manipulated very quickly with the least possible amount of juice, a highly parallelized datapath implemented in the programmable fabric of an FPGA is hard to beat. That’s why we have groups like the die-hard fringe of supercomputing – the “reconfigurable computing community” struggling for decades to build a tool infrastructure … Read More → "Merging with Agility"

Getting Back to a Simpler Life

A New Multicore Communications API is Ratified

by Bryon Moyer

April 22, 2008

Thanks to a late arrival, I walked briskly through the jetway and out into the terminal. Glancing out through the window, I confirmed, to my relief, what the map in the airline magazine had shown: my connection, while technically in another terminal, was in fact quite close. I could see it from here, although I was separated from it by about 40 yards and two layers of glass. But as I hurried in that direction, I realized that you could only get from one terminal to another on some tram-like affair; you couldn’t walk it without … Read More → "Getting Back to a Simpler Life"

Accommodating Change

Cadence Announces a Front-End ECO Tool

by Bryon Moyer

April 15, 2008

Someday someone will invent a useful engineering feature that can be plugged into telephone and email systems. Once an engineering project gets within a certain range of being complete, it will completely disconnect marketing so that they will have no way of radioing in feature changes at the last minute. But until that time, you know it’s gonna happen. And then you’re going to have to fight the fight over whether the change is worth it.

Changes can actually come from two directions: new features or the realization that … Read More → "Accommodating Change"

Synplicity Gets Spirit

ReadyIP Announcement has Bigger Implications

by Kevin Morris

April 15, 2008

While the word “ecosystem” is happily bantered about by major FPGA vendors, history would indicate that FPGA companies are less than perfect participants in the care and feeding of “ecosystems” to support their products. The turmoil associated with the love/hate, competitor/partner, customer/supplier relationships between FPGA companies and others providing various products and services to the FPGA community are well documented.

Commercial EDA companies are a perfect case-in-point. While trying to make a business creating and selling design tools to FPGA designers, they need to cooperate closely with … Read More → "Synplicity Gets Spirit"

Multicore Momentum

The Multicore Expo Bulks Up

by Bryon Moyer

April 15, 2008

A couple years ago a small ragtag conference took place in Santa Clara just before the relative behemoth Embedded Systems Conference. “Ragtag” might be a bit unfair, but it seemed that way only when compared to the much larger and better-funded conferences; perhaps “scrappy” is a better characterization. This was just a start, the first edition of the Multicore Expo, and at the time, many in multicore seemed to be grasping for relevance. The participants were all sure multicore was guaranteed in the future, but there was no swagger in the strut. Would … Read More → "Multicore Momentum"

Making Quality Everyone’s Business

A Quick Look at isQED

by Bryon Moyer

April 8, 2008

Nestled amongst the big noisy conventions like CES, ISSCC, and DAC can be found some more modest, highly focused conferences. These shows may cast a smaller shadow, but they may also benefit from the lack of attendant hoopla, since marketing pays less attention and engineers can focus on the business at hand. One such show that just took place was isQED, or the International Symposium on Quality Electronics Design. Now in its ninth year, isQED focuses on the interactions between design, test, quality, and manufacturing disciplines in the effort to improve such aspects as yield, quality, and … Read More → "Making Quality Everyone’s Business"

One to Many

FPGA Design Diversifies

by Kevin Morris

April 8, 2008

About a decade ago, FPGA design followed in the footsteps of ASIC and went language-based. For a very long time, the only question we asked ourselves was “VHDL or Verilog?” It was reminiscent of the “Paper or Plastic?” scenario in the grocery checkout line. Gradually, however, people sneaked into the FPGA-designing fold that weren’t FPGA designers. Who are these folks anyway? We’ve got DSP engineers, embedded systems designers, board designers, supercomputing folks… the list goes on and on.

Apparently all those new … Read More → "One to Many"

Java Earning Its Wings

Aonix Makes Real Time Almost Safety Critical

by Bryon Moyer

April 8, 2008

It happened just like that. In the middle of a conversation, he got a kind of misty look in his eyes, like something wasn’t quite right. His breathing became more labored, he hunched forward a bit, and the next thing you knew, he was in full heart attack mode. An ambulance was quickly called for; this is where seconds count. As the ambulance was en route, efforts were made to clear the way for the EMTs so that they could get to work as quickly as possible. The main door was propped open, and an … Read More → "Java Earning Its Wings"

Attacking Abuses of Power

Part 2

by Bryon Moyer

April 1, 2008

A few weeks ago, we started looking at ways of reducing power consumption when designing SoCs. We divided the world into the front-end, where the big payoff is, and the back-end, with useful techniques that have less dramatic impact. We looked at architecture and system design, hardware/software allocation and C-to-RTL, multicore, Multi-Voltage Supply (MVS), power switching, Dynamic Voltage/Frequency Scaling (DVFS), and Adaptive Voltage Scaling (AVS). These are techniques that can give power savings in the range of 30-50%. Having addressed those, there are numerous back-end techniques that can give more modest, but nonetheless valuable, power savings. We& … Read More → "Attacking Abuses of Power"