To see the future of embedded design, all we have to do is watch Tom Cruise.

Partway through “Minority Report,” the actor waves his hands in front on an enormous projection screen/hologram. He’s pushing around icons and shifting windows, an action we recognize immediately because they’re just like what we do every day with a typical Mac, PC, or iPhone. The only thing that’s different, really, is that he’s not physically touching anything. It’s all very cool and frankly is the only part of … Read More → "Displaying the Future"

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"

Once upon a time, a man was given a rope and was told that it would be useful for many things. That most anything could be done with that rope. And the man tried it out, found some things easy to do – tying a bow, for example – and some things hard – intricate cat’s cradle, for example. He found that he could tie large crab traps together on such a rope and run them out to sea and retrieve them later. But he also learned that having his foot in a coil as … Read More → "Shortening the Rope"

Once upon a time, a man was given a rope and was told that it would be useful for many things. That most anything could be done with that rope. And the man tried it out, found some things easy to do – tying a bow, for example – and some things hard – intricate cat’s cradle, for example. He found that he could tie large crab traps together on such a rope and run them out to sea and retrieve them later. But he also learned that having his foot in a coil as the pots were put … Read More → "Shortening the Rope"