Articles – Page 81

October 27, 2020

“Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival.” – W. Edwards Deming

New microprocessor designs often emerge from universities. But how often do processors go back into universities?

It’s a new decade, so a new processor is in fashion. Like hemlines and boy bands, processors rise and fall in popularity. There was the RISC Age. Then the VLIW Era. The Decade of DSPs. Now, it’s all RISC-V.

There are plenty of reasons for RISC-V’s popularity, … Read More → "Why Universities Want RISC-V"

Create Your Own RTOS in 1 Hour (Part 1)

Many Processors Can Do Their Own Task Switching in Hardware

by Jim Turley

October 26, 2020

“What fresh hell is this?” – Dorothy Parker

Want a fun late-summer project? Looking for a source of frustration? Need a quick hack to polish up your programming resume? Let’s create our own RTOS using the built-in hardware features of the x86 processor family and very little code.

Calling this an “RTOS” might be overselling it a bit. A real, real-time operating system will have lots of advanced features that this won’t have. This is more of a scheduler or task … Read More → "Create Your Own RTOS in 1 Hour (Part 1)"

Flex Logix Joins the Race to the Inferencing Edge

by Max Maxfield

October 22, 2020

Have you noticed that there seem to be a lot more products flaunting the fact that they are “Gluten Free” on the supermarket shelves these days? This sort of thing is obviously of interest to the estimated one person out of a hundred who has Celiac disease and is therefore intolerant to gluten, but do these product labels convey useful information or is it just noise dressed up to look like information?

When I first saw these labels, I assumed that the manufacturers had found some way to remove … Read More → "Flex Logix Joins the Race to the Inferencing Edge"

Find Your Keys in Nothing Flat

NXP’s Trimension Chips use UWB for Location Finding

by Jim Turley

October 21, 2020

“Location, location, location.” – Real estate mantra

Ultrawideband (UWB) is the proverbial twenty-year overnight success. The concept has been around for a long time, but it’s only now starting to hit the big time.

UWB takes a shotgun approach to wireless communications. Rather than beam a relatively strong signal within a narrow band, like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, TV, radio, and almost everything else, it spreads a very weak signal over a very wide range of frequencies. It’s wide and weak instead of … Read More → "Find Your Keys in Nothing Flat"

Cadence Brings Clarity to EMI

System-Level Solver Slashes Sim Times

by Kevin Morris

October 20, 2020

EMI is the ghost in our machines, the phantom of our electronic operas. We create our systems with a specific purpose, and our engineering efforts aim to hone and optimize toward that goal. At the same time, lurking in the copper traces and wayward return paths are silent specters seeking to derail our plans. They haunt our designs undetected, biding their time until the final day of reckoning, when they make their presence known, trashing our schedules and wreaking havoc on our best laid plans.

They say there are two … Read More → "Cadence Brings Clarity to EMI"

Best and Worst Smart Home Interfaces

An Unplanned Trial of Several Products Reveals Big Differences

by Jim Turley

October 19, 2020

“’Easy to use’ is easy to say.” – Jeff Garber

My tech-savvy kids are preparing to move to another country, so I just inherited a lot of “smart home” gadgets that won’t work in their new place. Now I’ve got a box full of smart connected electrical outlets, Wi-Fi wall switches, wireless security cameras, and other gizmos. Hey, free toys! But configuring them all back to back was an exercise in frustration – with a few notable exceptions.

Naturally, every single device … Read More → "Best and Worst Smart Home Interfaces"

Feast Your Orbs on NVIDIA’s Jetson Nano 2GB Dev Kit

by Max Maxfield

October 15, 2020

It’s a funny old world and no mistake. Just a few days ago as I pen these words, I was on a video chat with my chum Adam Taylor, who hangs his hat in the UK. If you are desperately bored and/or need something to do, please feel free to watch this video and let me know what you think.

Adam and I were … Read More → "Feast Your Orbs on NVIDIA’s Jetson Nano 2GB Dev Kit"

Updating the Centuries-Old On/Off Switch

Menlo Micro Reinvents the Lowly SPDT Switch

by Jim Turley

October 14, 2020

“I’m so fast that last night I turned off the light switch in my hotel room and was in bed before the room was dark.” — Muhammad Ali

In the Beginning, there were electrons. Then came wire. Then the switch. And it was good.

At some level, wires and switches are all we need to make digital electronic systems. Submicron transistors are the switches and stacked metal layers are the wires. Progress, eh?

But some systems … Read More → "Updating the Centuries-Old On/Off Switch"

If AMD Buys Xilinx

What Happens to FPGAs?

by Kevin Morris

October 13, 2020

Six years ago, we speculated about what would happen if Intel were to buy Altera. A year later, they did, and a lot of our speculation came true – Intel has leveraged Altera technology to defend their dominance of the data center, the FPGA market has changed direction, and the Altera culture has been largely assimilated into the larger Intel pool. The decades-long feud between Xilinx and Altera has cooled.

Two years ago, we … Read More → "If AMD Buys Xilinx"

What Is a Compiler, Anyway?

Programming 101 for Smart People

by Jim Turley

October 12, 2020

“We still have judgement here, that we but teach bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague th’inventor.” – Macbeth, 1.7

Today we dive into Computer Programming 101.

Computers don’t speak English. Or Mandarin, or German, or Spanish, or any other human language. Despite how Siri and Alexa may appear, computers and other gadgets are native speakers of their own binary tongues, languages that we can’t understand.

That means that if you want to program a … Read More → "What Is a Compiler, Anyway?"