When I first started working for an FPGA company a decade ago, I was stunned to find out how many power supply rails these parts required. I’d never encountered chips that needed five to ten (or more) power supply rails. Even back in the old, old PMOS days, chips needed only three supply voltages and, for a few fortunate decades, 5 volts was all you ever … Read More → "Powering FPGAs is a Giant Hassle. Here’s Some Help."
FPGA place-and-route software goes too fast, said no one ever. In fact, FPGA vendors have spent considerable effort in making their design software run faster on multicore processors. A paper recently presented at the ACM’s FPGA 2022 conference titled “RapidStream: Parallel Physical Implementation of FPGA HLS Designs,” describes a very interesting approach to pushing HLS designs through FPGA design software running on multicore processors faster. The … Read More → "Can HLS Partitioning Speed Up Placement and Routing of FPGA Designs? Yes, Oh Yes!"
The IBM PC (aka the IBM 5150) had such a massive impact on computing history that origin stories about the machine are legion. Many books have been written to tell the stories of a rag-tag group of isolated engineers in IBM’s Entry Systems Business, down in Boca Raton, Florida. William C. Lowe initially led the group. He got the job after he told IBM’s Corporate … Read More → "How the Intel 8088 Got Its Bus"
Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.
In fact it’s cold as hell – Elton John, Rocketman
Mars is hard. Only 26 of 56 missions sent to Mars have been successful. Landing on Mars is … Read More → "An FPGA Flies on Mars"
Let me sail, let me sail
Let the Orinoco flow
Let me reach, let me beach
On the shores of Tripoli
Let me sail, let me sail
Let me crash … Read More → "Can You Insert Hardware Trojan Spyware IP into an IC at the Fab? Yes, You Can"
I watched the first season of “Ted Lasso” with my family over the Thanksgiving holiday in late November. If you’re one of the few people, like me, who aren’t familiar with the series, it’s based on a 2013 concept ad series by NBC Sports touting the channel’s coverage of the UK’s top-level Premier League football (“soccer” in the US) matches. Jason Sudeikis … Read More → "New Semiconductor Technologies Are Rarely What They Seem at First Glance"
