Introduction

Over two-fifths of FPGA design projects fall behind schedule. In order to reduce risk of delay of product delivery, changes need to be made not just in verification and production but also in the design process. Design simplification must be a principle that starts at the beginning of the project life cycle – before verification of complex code has become the bottleneck that delays project delivery.

For FPGA design, there are several methodologies that can be adopted to make life easier for both design and verification engineers. Two of these … Read More → "Avoid FPGA Project Delays by Adopting Advanced Design Methodologies"

We always thought we knew how it would go down.

Under cover of darkness, our black-clad insertion team would rappel down the walls of the super-secret Xilinx fortress in the desert.  With the kind of precision timing and teamwork found only in movies and editorial feature introductions, we’d scan the perimeter and locate the vulnerable point.  A diamond-tipped drill bit driven by a silent motor would bore a hole just large enough for our fiber-optic viewing tool, and the telling video would be immediately beamed back to FPGA Journal headquarters.  At the … Read More → "Not Bad Die"

New process nodes have a predictable rhythm.  Until about 90nm, we knew before anybody announced anything that we’d get double the density, half the power (dynamic, of course), and 50% more speed than we had in the previous generation.  Of course, that made waiting for the announcements from semiconductor companies a little less than suspenseful.  Our Moore’s Law alarm clock would beep on its two-year cycle.  We’d check to see if anybody had announced the thing we were expecting yet, and then we’d hit the one-month snooze button … Read More → "40nm Altera Stratix IV"

Everyone knows that if you want to do things slowly, you do them one at a time. If you want to get more done, you get more people to help do things in parallel. Right? I mean, in the world of electronics, think “serial,” and what might come to mind is the slow, stately procession of bits plodding from your desktop to some not-very-needy peripheral. You want speed? Check out the parallel port, where multiple lines are willing and able to deliver the kind of data demanded by your more high-maintenance attention-craving peripherals.

Read More → "High-Speed Serial Comes to the Analog/Digital Divide"