We’ve all experienced it.  

The SPDIF output on device A doesn’t match with the analog line inputs on pre-amp B, which don’t synchronize with the VGA-to-composite-to-component de-interlacing, re-sampling, trans-formatter box connected to the monitor from the output device, which now really wants HDMI from your 1968 turntable.  The problem of non-standard, proprietary, incompatible, poor-performing interfaces has dogged audio-visual equipment for decades, and most of us have a giant rat’s nest of cabling tucked behind some piece of furniture in our house to prove it.

In the modern era, when … Read More → "AV Done Right. Finally."

Flexible, powerful, and misunderstood, FPGAs are an admittedly enigmatic technology. Like the proverbial elephant amidst the blind men, the topic of FPGAs can produce a different view from every perspective – technology, applications, design tools, business… Sit down with a non-peer to have a conversation about FPGAs and you may end up wishing you were discussing something a little less controversial – like healthcare in the United States, perhaps.

Because of their inherent flexibility, FPGAs address a wide variety of problems in a number of different markets and application areas.  In each of those areas, each FPGA vendor … Read More → "Your Boss’s Birthday Present"

You bring a new product to market, and, within weeks, a rival appears, one that is clearly a rip-off of your design: not just looking like yours or performing much the same functions, but actually a clone of your design. There are shed-loads of statistics that show that the problem is increasing within the electronics industry and a mass of anecdotal evidence that indicates that designs using FPGAs are being increasingly targeted.

As FPGAs have moved from simply mopping up glue-logic to becoming full-blown Systems on Chip (SoCs), so they now embody the key Intellectual Property (IP) … Read More → "AES and Antifuses"