“Beep beep’m beep beep yeah,” – John Lennon and Paul McCartney
While several companies are expending significant resources and large amounts of energy to develop automated driving for passenger vehicles, trucks, and buses here on Earth, a dedicated group of scientists and engineers at JPL (the Jet Propulsion Lab) have been working on a related but significantly different problem: creating autonomous driving … Read More → "Baby You Can Drive My Rover"
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the lab
Not a tech was stirring, not even in the fab;
The daughter cards were hung by their headers with care,
In hopes that St. VPX soon would be there;
In this week’s episode of Fish Fry, we are diving deep into the world of VPX. Dave Caserza, Michael Munroe, Ovidiu Mesesan ( … Read More → "Clear and Present Signals"
The sun is mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees
– “Why Does the Sun Shine?,” They Might Be Giants (originally from the album “Space Songs,” 1959)
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe reached its first perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) on November 5. At that time, the probe was flying approximately 15 … Read More → "The Solar System’s Fastest FPGAs Journey to the Sun Carrying a Microprocessor Relic on Board"
Processors and FPGAs go together like chocolate and peanut butter, but it took a few years to get the recipe just right. Early turn-of-the-millennium attempts included the Xilinx Virtex II Pro with an on-chip PowerPC processor core and Altera’s Excalibur device with an ARM922T processor core. These early products are considered market failures. Actually, Kevin Morris called the Altera Excalibur “a monumental flop” in his article titled “< … Read More → "Microsemi Joins RISC-V Love Fest with SoC FPGA"
That flash thumb drive you have in your pocket is a beast of a memory. We store so much stuff in so little space; that form factor has completely democratized the storing of masses of data that would once have been assigned to a giant data center of yore. And all in your pocket now.
Of course, this comes at a cost. This is NAND flash, and … Read More → "Communication Solves Flash Unpredictability"
“I’m from the generation that wants to put a GPS in their kids so I always know where they are.” – Joss Whedon
It’s a trend as old as time. A new technology – rockets, computers, microwaves; take your pick – starts out expensive and exclusive, but then winds up so cheap and plentiful that we barely think about it.
< … Read More → "Is There an “IoT” in “Satellite?”"
