The new iPhone is out.
Don’t panic, but you need to make some changes.
First, when you go home today, do something for the other side of your brain – you know, the right side. Don’t roll your eyes, this is important. It’s for your career.
It doesn’t really matter what you do, as long as it engages your intuition rather than reason. Go hear a band. Visit an art show. Dance. Finger paint.
As embedded systems … Read More → "Creating Cool"
The race car flies into the pits just below the maximum speed – its automatic governor making sure that the team isn’t assessed a penalty. Exhaust gases vent at 1500 degrees fahrenheit as throttle valves close. Over a million dollars worth of high-performance technology glides down the tarmac to the designated pit. The crew is already engaged: tires are off and replacement rubber is being mounted, fuel is gushing into the tank through a high-volume filler connection, and the pit chief runs out with the critical component to keep the team in the race – … Read More → "Duct Tape, WD-40, FPGAs"
The math is simple. When the amount of power required to double the speed of one processor far exceeds the amount of power required for two processors, it’s time to be thinking about multi-core. This idea has been around for at least thirty years. We all knew it would eventually happen. Supercomputing was probably the first to fall. The giant monolithic supercomputer was rendered obsolete by massively parallel processing arrays years ago. In the desktop computing world, we have made the jump from single core to multi-core for high-end machines within … Read More → "Freescale Goes Multi-Core"
Actel has announced a significant round of enhancements to their space-bound FPGA families, including a new, power-efficient line called RTAX-SL. Before we jump into those announcements, let’s have a brief discussion on what happens when we put tiny little space helmets on our FPGAs and launch them into orbit.
FPGAs and spacecraft would seem like a match made in the heavens. As you might guess, spacecraft are far from mass-produced. Developing a custom chip such as an ASIC for a satellite can result in astronomical unit prices by the time you amortize … Read More → "Space FPGAs Get a Boost"
What happens when you put a few million lines of open source software into orbit? At this point, maybe nobody knows. We’ll all get to find out soon, however. Wind River Systems has just announced a deal with Honeywell Aerospace that will place the company’s Carrier-Grade Linux (CGL) on board the “New Millenium Program Space Technology 8” (ST8) spacecraft, scheduled for launch in November 2009. Wind River’s CGL (See, we’re talking like space-pros already – making acronyms for everything) will be seated in what certainly could be … Read More → "Launching Linux"
The sculptor Auguste Rodin was asked how he created his amazing statues. He replied, “I choose a block of marble and chip off whatever I don’t need.” Michelangelo is also sometimes attributed with a similar quote. “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” These two quotes are probably the origin of the well-worn story about the sculptor who, when asked how to carve a statue of a horse said, “I simply chisel away everything that doesn’t look like a … Read More → "Altium’s Alternative"
Parallel processing has long been held to be the way to achieve high processing throughput at a reasonable cost. Yet there are still few generally available systems, and it is seen as being difficult to do. European Editor Dick Selwood spoke to the pioneer of parallel processing, Iann Barron, about the issues.
Thirty years ago Iann Barron was one of the founders of the British semiconductor company, INMOS. The company was set up for several reasons, but one of them was to commercialise parallel processing, using a specialised device called the transputer. Inmos has now disappeared, … Read More → "Parallel Processing Considered Not Harmful"
If you own a Cajun cookbook, you may have noticed that virtually every recipe begins with this step. If you can’t make a Roux, you can’t cook Cajun. The recipe for Roux (if you can find one) is always fairly vague – “Put some flour and oil in a pot and heat until the color changes to brown.” How much flour? How much oil? How much heat? What shade of brown? All of these questions are, as we learned in engineering school, “left as an exercise for the … Read More → "First, Make a Roux"
The world of embedded electronics exists on the bounty of Moore’s Law. Every two years, our canvas doubles in size, and the creations we can conceive seem to square in complexity. As embedded systems engineers, we live in an odd universe where “status quo” involves a steady forty-year exponential growth curve. Such an extraordinary trend has a way of creating its own distorted reality.
This week, the annual Design Automation Conference is in session in San Diego, California. This is the 44th annual conference, which means that DAC has … Read More → "Enigmatic EDA"
This week, at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Diego, FPGA tool specialists Synplicity announced the acquisition of the Swedish company Hardi Electronics – supplier of FPGA-based prototyping boards. Why is this interesting? It gives us a number of insights into the increasing role of FPGAs in system-level verification, the complex nature of the tools market for FPGAs, and the volatility of the EDA business in general.
FPGAs have long been used as prototyping vehicles for ASIC designs, ASSP designs, board-based system designs, and of course for FPGA-based designs. As a long-time leading … Read More → "FPGAs at DAC"
