Articles – Page 554

Moving Data with VME

February 5, 2008

So VME has pretty much had to toil in what might feel like obscurity as compared with the attention that the PCI derivatives and ATCA have garnered. And you might – just maybe – be forgiven for thinking that VME is an old standard that’s pretty much restricted to legacy applications. But you’d be wrong. Yes, VME’s application market has narrowed. But there is still demand, and that demand is sustained based on developments to the VMEbus standard that sprang from the VME Renaissance of 2002.

The original basic VMEbus standard has & … Read More → "Moving Data with VME"

State of the Union – Addressed

Major Players Weigh in on FPGA

by Kevin Morris

February 5, 2008

Since I was moderating the panel, and we know how these things tend to go, we had a pre-meeting before the conference to get the preliminaries out of the way:
Moderator (me): OK, let’s get started with our FPGA panel discussion…
Exec #1: My chips are faster than yours.
Exec #2: No they aren’t, but they use way more power.
Exec #3: That’s just because you’re not using our design tools.
Exec #4: Nobody uses your design tools. Everyone uses ours because they’ … Read More → "State of the Union – Addressed"

Working Embedded Networking

by Bryon Moyer

February 5, 2008

Many companies who develop and sell specialized electronics have realized the benefits of adding network connectivity to their products. It can, however, be a daunting task for an engineering group that specializes in some other facet of the industry (medical, security, building automation, industrial, etc.) to build and design wired 802.3 or wireless 802.11 networking into their end device. In addition to time-to-market concerns, stability, robustness, RFC compliance, agency certifications, support and other challenges, can become overwhelming.

To help mitigate the risk and headaches for designers, complete off-the-shelf communication modules are widely available. Such solutions support a wide variety … Read More → "Working Embedded Networking"

Moving Data with VME

by Bryon Moyer

February 5, 2008

There was a time when they could fill a huge stadium. They were the headliners. They were the go-to guys. And they had a good run. But, as is typical, upstarts made a grab for the spotlight, winning the attention of an audience eager for shiny new things. But this didn’t deter them, and they didn’t stop moving forward. They didn’t retreat to controversy-free PBS reunion specials. They made sure their loyal followers got what they wanted, and they kept new things coming to keep them from getting bored and looking … Read More → "Moving Data with VME"

Pumping up Premier

Synplicity Boosts Flagship Tool

by Kevin Morris

January 29, 2008

With excellent tools available almost for free from FPGA companies, you might wonder why top notch design teams still pay for high-end FPGA tools from companies like Synplicity. This week, Synplicity helped us out with that question with new improvements to their top-of-the-line synthesis offering – Synplify Premier. Premier is now updated with new capabilities, and — probably more important – support for the industry’s latest, biggest, baddest FPGAs, including Xilinx’s Virtex-5 family, and beta support for Altera’s Stratix III, Stratix IIGX, and Stratix II families.

Synplicity’s Synplify … Read More → "Pumping up Premier"

IP – European Style

by Dick Selwood

January 29, 2008

IP07 was the tenth meeting in Grenoble of IP providers and users under the umbrella of Design and Reuse (www.designandreuse.com), the IP portal. Europe editor Dick Selwood compares facts and marketing-speak.

It sounds like the start of a joke. “There were three processor manufacturers at a conference….” And when the three processor manufacturers were asked, “What is needed to service the power- conscious emerging mobile video marketplace?” they came up with three similar answers. The man from MIPS said that it … Read More → "IP – European Style"

A Bid to Simplify Flash Subsystem Design

by Bryon Moyer

January 29, 2008

Flash memory, once exotic and expensive, has followed in DRAM’s steps to become a familiar everyday technology. Even more than DRAM perhaps: when was the last time you went to a drug store and picked up a DRAM card while you were there?

As with DRAM, this has been motivated by price decreases: the price per megabyte of Flash is falling by roughly half every year, and volume has responded with a compound annual growth rate of about 170%, according to Denali Software, Inc. Couple this with the fact that Flash is … Read More → "A Bid to Simplify Flash Subsystem Design"

Three “I”s of FPGA Design: Iterations, Incremental and Intelligent Design Tools

by Bryon Moyer

January 22, 2008

The flexibility offered by field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) has made design iterations an integral part of the FPGA design process. Traditionally, engineers quickly wrote hardware description language (HDL) for their design, ran synthesis and place-and-route on it, programmed the FPGA and tested design functionality directly in hardware. If a performance issue or a functional bug was discovered, appropriate modifications were made to the HDL, followed by re-synthesis and re-place-and-route to obtain a new FPGA bit-stream and re-testing the hardware. This flow was fast enough to easily allow a few iterations in one day.

Incremental Design Moves Towards Mainstream

by Bryon Moyer

January 22, 2008

I have this recurring nightmare. I’m supposed to write a chapter for a book. I’ve pretty much got it done, doing some final editing on the last paragraph, and then on review realize that the first paragraph has changed mysteriously. So I fix it, but then another paragraph changes. I never seem to be able to get all the paragraphs right. And then someone else submits his chapter, and for some reason my chapter gets all screwed up. Of course, that’s about the time I also realize that I forgot that I had … Read More → "Incremental Design Moves Towards Mainstream"

Platformification

Look It Up

by Kevin Morris

January 22, 2008

Webster’s Dictionary defines “Platformification” as – OK, you got us. It’s not in Webster’s. Even Microsoft Word gives us the squiggly red line telling us we’re treading on dangerous ground. Wikipedia – no better. We got diverted to some articles about Mario Brothers and other games where characters jump around from platform to platform – not unlike embedded systems designers choosing and then abandoning various combinations of processors, operating system, and peripherals powering their creations.

Intel tried to stick us with the word & … Read More → "Platformification"