Articles – Page 556

February 12, 2008

The swamp screams loudly around the abandoned road as the jousters position themselves for their impending bout. Somewhere, in the back of their alcohol-soaked brains, they visualize themselves as medieval warriors mounting their steeds in a duel of chivalrous wit. In the real world, their decrepit death-trap pickup trucks are a far cry from the mounts they mentally mimic, and the assembled audience of mosquitoes, flies, and the occasional bullfrog hardly constitutes the cheering throngs envisioned by these imbecilic soldiers of the sullen South.

With a final swig from their respective flasks of courage and … Read More → "45nm Chicken"

Utilizing Power Management Techniques in Embedded Multicore Devices

by Kevin Morris

February 12, 2008

There are many accepted reasons that support a move to multicore design in portable devices: scalability, specialty cores, increased performance, and reduced power consumption are just a few. This article, however, takes the approach that there is only one true reason why multicore makes an attractive platform for portable devices.

Before we explore that one reason, let’s debunk a couple of the more common reasons about multicore. For example, scalability is often cited a key reason to move to multicore because if one core is not fast enough then one can add another. … Read More → "Utilizing Power Management Techniques in Embedded Multicore Devices"

ARM Mobilizes Graphics

Mali 2D Standards Buffet

by Kevin Morris

February 12, 2008

First, JSR184 was out there all by itself, carrying the Mali mantra to the masses – bringing smart feature phones fancy graphics capabilities formerly found only on immobile devices like computers and gaming consoles. Now, ARM has fleshed out the Mali software/middleware family with JSR226, JSR287, and SVG-t. What does this alphabet soup of standards designations mean?

For starters, let’s remember that ARM is an IP company. Their business is based on licensing processor IP (and all of the goodies that surround processor IP) primarily to mobile handset developers. As … Read More → "ARM Mobilizes Graphics"

DesignCon Steps it Up

Eye Candy for the Digital Designer

by Kevin Morris

February 5, 2008

DesignCon is one of the few industry events that manage to be simultaneously broad and focused. The conference overview proudly proclaims, “DesignCon attracts engineering professionals from various levels and disciplines and represents many aspects of electronic design.” For a small-ish event, this would seem like a recipe for disaster. With topic categories ranging from signal integrity in multi-gigabit serial interconnect to power-aware design, test fixturing, and “business and engineering impacts,” you’d expect a program that leaps around from topic to topic like a kid with ADD manning the cable remote.</ … Read More → "DesignCon Steps it Up"

Moving Data with VME

by Kevin Morris

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"