Last week, in “ARM and Altera – Why You Should Care,” we looked at the announcement of an Altera Cyclone III development kit for the ARM Cortex M1 soft-core processor.  We discussed ARM’s quiet conquest of the market for embedded computing with FPGAs and how the Cyclone III announcement moved the IP core from niche player to mainstream programmable logic platform.  This week, we discuss Actel’s announcement of a focus on handheld and portable applications.  As we discussed in our “Battery-Powered Proof” feature two weeks ago, FPGAs have … Read More → "Low Power Processing"

FPGAs are power-hungry monsters, right?  We all learned this ten years ago, and un-learning it sometimes seems beyond the capabilities of the electronic design community.  We plod along with our pre-conceptions, patiently ignoring the evolving reality.  In truth, low-power FPGAs have been available for years now.  Depending on your application, you can find a programmable logic device that fits just about any power budget.  Ask the average designer on the street, though, and you’ll usually get the same response: “We couldn’t use an FPGA in our design because, you … Read More → "Battery-Powered Proof"

With today’s automobiles acting as mass-produced rolling showcases of electronic technology, winning sockets in automotive electronics applications has become a major goal of just about every semiconductor company.  The draw is enormous.  In many countries, consumers pour a huge chunk of their monthly budgets into automobiles, and the percentage of that money that flows into electronics is also rapidly increasing.  We have reached a sweet spot in electronic technology capabilities where the number of new, useful features that can be added to automobiles with advanced electronics is exploding. 

FPGA and programmable … Read More → "Auto Market Assault"

It’s no accident that PCB design was one of the first electronics design tasks to which computer technology was applied in an effort to automate the process. The EDA industry really had its roots in the need to handle the explosion in circuit complexity brought about by the advent of digital electronics and, in particular, the rise of the microprocessor in electronics design. Traditional manual design techniques became too cumbersome to manage when faced with the onslaught of higher pin counts, multi-line signal buses and growing numbers of board layers.

Today it’s unthinkable … Read More → "Design Tool Evolution"

These days, a number of companies are ferociously burning venture capital in order to develop new programmable architectures that offer a better tradeoff in the performance/power/cost space than existing devices such as traditional von Neumann processors or FPGAs.  Typically, these architectures attempt to parallelize the processing problem with cleverly connected redundant hardware.  In order to obtain their venture capital, these companies produce sophisticated and complex PowerPoint propaganda describing in detail (or so it seems) how their path to parallelism outperforms existing architectures by factors ranging from two to two thousand. 

Savvy venture … Read More → "Surveillance Silicon"