System Management has historically been a topic of concern for high-end systems.  For designers of low-cost, single-board applications, “system management” often consisted of a couple of 9V battery clips, an FET, an LED, and some bailing wire.  However, the proliferation of sophisticated technology into low-end systems, combined with the increasingly urgent need for power efficiency, has moved true system management issues right down into the realm of the single-boarders.

Many single board systems today are getting into big-league system management requirements with multiple power supplies in a variety of voltages, power management, thermal … Read More → "Cheap Chip-Keeping"

Introduction

Insatiable demand for high definition video and rapidly proliferating video production and distribution methods are driving the need for advanced video encoding and compression schemes. Several international standards and forums have been established in recent years to deal with various aspects of digital video encoding. The MPEG-4 Part10/H.264 encoding standard is useful in a wide range of professional video applications including broadcast head-end, IPTV, multi-stream encoding / decoding, and image processing, among others.

The standard provides for a higher level—and wider range—of compression and quality of the compressed … Read More → "FPOAs Meet the Challenges of H.264 Encoding of High Definition Video"

Last week we examined the legacy of the LUT – the basic building block that defines the very fabric of FPGAs.  Surprisingly, however, the primary driver of attributes such as cost, power consumption, and utility in FPGAs is not the fabric itself, but the choice of I/O for the device.  You see, while the internal logic keeps shrinking, some of the I/O structures don’t really scale well – things like bonding pads and higher-current transistors don’t track Moore’s Law, so the cost of an individual I/O compared with … Read More → "I/O-topia"

In olden times, when digital dinosaurs roamed the vast plains of our circuit boards – when 22V10’s walked the earth in vast herds, programmable logic devices were essentially nothing more than routing.  By creating an array of programmable interconnect, you could essentially hard-wire any complex combinational logic function.  PLDs quickly evolved into FPGAs, however, as it became clear that more structural variation was required than and and/or matrix, and sequential behavior was highly desired from programmable logic.

FPGA, as we all know, stands for “Field Programmable Gate Array.”  However, … Read More → "FP?A"

Collectors and restorers of vintage automobiles place a high value on factory-original parts.  Most cherished are parts that are still in perfect condition and still installed on the original auto.  One tick down the desirability hierarchy are identical original parts taken from another vehicle – not as cool as the “matching serial number” perfection of the original unit, but very close.  Restorers scour salvage yards and wrecks behind barns, sometimes even resorting to theft in order to obtain the one missing link that would complete their masterpiece.

If original iron is absolutely … Read More → "NOS FPGA"