“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of hardware design, it was the age of programming,
it was the epoch of synthesis, it was the epoch of compilation,
it was the season of optimization, it was the season of acceleration,
it was the spring of flexibility, it was the winter of automation,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Hardware, we were all going direct
the other way–in short, the period … Read More → "SRC Code"

What has over two million real ASIC gates, runs at over 200MHz with twenty levels of logic, burns about the power of a cell-based ASIC, and is economically feasible to deploy even in mid-to-small volume production? The answer is “Not an FPGA”. While these specs may sound close to the marketing picture painted by programmable logic vendors, there is a vast gulf between the brochure and real-world performance in an average application. Structured and platform ASICs, however, can realistically reach these goals in your average application, and getting design teams to understand that fact is one of … Read More → "LSI Logic’s Leverage"

From before my kids were born until after they were grown and graduated, it was a June ritual. Twenty-one times in all, I made my annual pilgrimage to the Design Automation Conference (DAC), perhaps the most misunderstood massing of technology professionals our industry has to offer. DAC is “Burning Man” for the left brain – a mysteriously gravitational gathering that inexplicably pulls people from around the globe to one central location in non-consensual celebration of the unclear.

This year, the 42nd annual DAC was held in Anaheim California. It featured 240 exhibitors, 60 of whom were showing … Read More → "Ditchin’ DAC"

The tool category known as “Kitchen Appliances” covers a wide gamut of capabilities. Kitchen appliances range from general-purpose, universally useful tools such as heat sources, to highly specialized, perhaps less-than-indispensable technologies like “in-the-egg scramblers”. If someone tells you that his or her tool is a kitchen appliance, you haven’t really gained any useful information about its utility for your particular application.

The design tool category known as “ESL” has similar characteristics. When someone tries to sell you an ESL tool, it’s never quite clear what you’ … Read More → "What the Hell is ESL?"

It was in the late 1990s that FPGA vendors first started exploring the low-cost, high-volume consumer market – a market that generally was ceded to standard, fixed-function devices. Exploring this market was made possible by the development of FPGAs with the right balance of features and the migration to advanced process nodes which helped to drastically reduce FPGA unit costs.

Historically for high-volume, price-sensitive applications, FPGAs were not the lowest-cost solution. However, as custom logic and FPGAs started to get pad-limited vs. core-limited, this started to change. Pad limitation occurs when the size … Read More → "FPGAs Enabling Consumer Electronics – A Growing Trend"

Context can drastically impact the meaning of a simple word. If you’re walking down the street minding your own business, you might find yourself feeling more than a little bit offended if someone calls you dense. You may even experience a brief but painful flashback to that dreaded walk through the gauntlet of cool kids lining the halls in school, hearing any number of rude, if inaccurate, comments (after all, who’s calling who dense?) thrown with casual abandon in your direction. Now, change the circumstance. You’re at a tradeshow, … Read More → "Are These Guys Dense, or What?"

As the cost per gate of FPGAs continues to plummet, developers of embedded software applications are being presented with increased opportunities to create high performance, hardware-accelerated systems. These systems—which represent applications in domains ranging from image processing and DSP to larger-scale applications for scientific computing—benefit from the massive levels of parallelism that are available when FPGAs are used as alternatives to traditional processor architectures.

This article describes how the convergence of easier-to-use, more powerful FPGA-based computing platforms and software-to-hardware design tools can make the design of accelerated FPGA-based algorithms easier and more practical … Read More → "Accelerating C Software Applications Using a CompactFlash FPGA Accelerator Card"

When I bought my first 10MB hard-disk drive, the salesman came to visit and even took me out to lunch. I was a freshman in engineering school and I was buying the $10,000 unit for my employer, a hotel chain, to use for storing reservation data. At the time, a purchase of that amount of mass storage was a major transaction, both for our little company and for our supplier. The disk drive, about the size of a modern desktop computer, was delivered and installed by a trained technician who spent an hour with us going over the operating procedures … Read More → "Shrink-wrapping EDA"

The preparation starts weeks in advance. Whole grains are stone-ground – the resulting flour combined with honey extracted from backyard beehives over a period of months. The dough is then pressed and baked on hand-forged pans in wood-fired ovens until a fine golden crust appears that can be crushed into flakes of exactly the right consistency. After cooling, the flakes are poured into handmade pottery bowls, fired the previous week after being slung from native clay dug from the local riverbed. Finally, right before breakfast, milk from cows raised on grain grown in your own field is poured over the … Read More → "Core Sample"

In most markets, there exist a set of de-facto rules. Sport-utility vehicles have bad fuel economy. Economy cars have limited cargo space. FPGAs use too much power. ASICs have staggering non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs. Generally, the players play by those rules, and the consumer enters every buying decision with a pre-defined understanding of the tradeoffs those rules imply and which basic option favors their situation. The final choice is then decided by a comparison of the less-critical factors that differentiate the products in each area. Once a design team has decided to go with a zero-NRE solution, for example, … Read More → "Redefining Structured ASIC"