Articles – Page 517

Network Hardware & Internet Communities

April 21, 2009

MontaVista and QNX Open Up Open-Source

Open-source software development is all about community. “Crowd sourcing” of content and talent is all the rage these days, and various social media have made it easier to collaborate with people you’ve never met. Little wonder, then, that software companies have opened their virtual doors to all comers.

A case in point is MontaVista, a long-time supporter of open-source Linux, especially for embedded systems. The company has launched Meld, … Read More → "Network Hardware & Internet Communities"

Programmers Appreciate a Good Stack

by Jim Turley

April 21, 2009

Stack size is a matter of personal preference. Most programmers like large, well-endowed stacks that stretch the memory fabric to nearly overflowing. Others like to squeeze in smaller but perfectly formed ones with no wasted space. Whatever your predilection, handling an appropriately sized stack is usually done by feel instead of by the numbers. But that’s about to change.

Measuring stack size is the tricky part. It can be hard to get your arms around the problem. Most of us will just eyeball a passing stack and declare it too big, too small, or just … Read More → "Programmers Appreciate a Good Stack"

Bringing it Together – Some of It Anyway

Synopsys Announces Lynx and Discovery

by Bryon Moyer

April 21, 2009

The EDA world is rife with point solutions. No sooner might you think it’s time to stitch together a unified flow when some new requirement of some new technology makes some new point tool necessary for effective design.

And so it goes; an IC design environment might have a dozen or two (or more) tools that must be invoked at one time or another. It’s not a flow, it’s more like an artist’s palette, with all the capabilities laid out in a more or less unstructured … Read More → "Bringing it Together – Some of It Anyway"

Altium Goes for the Masses

Breaking the EDA Mold... Again

by Kevin Morris

April 21, 2009

This week, Altium is introducing a new model for the purchase of electronic design tools, in an attempt to create a grass-roots revolution that will change the nature of the electronic design automation (EDA) market. For the past several years, Altium has been marching to a different drummer – focusing on an integrated desktop design tool suite that spans the gamut of electronic design from system-level specification to board and package layout and verification to FPGA design and to embedded software development and debug. We characterize this approach as the “Microsoft Office” of EDA – bundling together key … Read More → "Altium Goes for the Masses"

Selecting the Ideal FPGA Vendor for Military Programs

by Jim Turley

April 15, 2009

Evaluating Competing Criteria

Developing a system design for government projects typically requires a defense contractor to evaluate and make system decisions based on documents such as a request for proposal (RFP), statement of work (SOW), and concept of operations (CONOP) as shown in Figure 1. From these documents, a contractor must assess system alternatives while maximizing the customer’s expected system goals, objectives, and capabilities. As with any complex design, there may be competing goals and objectives, … Read More → "Selecting the Ideal FPGA Vendor for Military Programs"

Implementing a Multirate Uncompressed Video Interface for Broadcast Applications

by Jim Turley

April 15, 2009

Introduction

The emergence of the high-definition (HD) 1080p video standard has presented some formidable design challenges for broadcast system engineers. While HD broadcasting now is established as the de facto standard for video broadcast around the world, new production equipment still must be able to handle the legacy of standard-definition (SD) and 1080i interfaces. This puts equipment manufacturers under pressure to build a cost-effective video interface solution that can handle multi-rate video. High-speed FPGA ICs, design tools, … Read More → "Implementing a Multirate Uncompressed Video Interface for Broadcast Applications"

But What Does It Mean?

Tagging, Indexing, and Querying Behaviors in RTL Designs

by Bryon Moyer

April 14, 2009

We’ve all been there before. We get handed a design that someone else did, most likely someone that’s no longer around, no longer accessible. Into our laps it falls, warts and all. Only, it’s hard to tell which behaviors in the design are warts and which are wants. It might have been C code (possibly the most broadly available means of obscuring intent ever devised), it might have been a PERL script (ok, also obscure, but attempted only by the cognoscenti), perhaps RTL, an Excel spreadsheet, or whatever. Bottom line, we’ve … Read More → "But What Does It Mean?"

Fitting the Tool to the Job

by Dick Selwood

April 14, 2009

Names are strange, and programming language names can be even stranger. Given the thousands of languages that exist, it is inevitable that there are some strange ones out there. ENGLISH was a good name for what turned out to be a non-runner, and “The Last One” was a click-and-point code-generator, generating BASIC (one of the last of the acronym language names.) I have a weakness for the wacky – Python, for example was named after Monty Python’s Flying Circus – but also like the elegance of naming a language after a pioneer. occam was named after … Read More → "Fitting the Tool to the Job"

Incremental Synthesis

by Kevin Morris

April 14, 2009

Hardware designers are a proud and detail-oriented group that takes great personal pride in the product of its efforts. Many engineers are drawn to hardware design—rather than, say, software work—to give their detail-oriented nature room to thrive. As early as their first freshman lab exercises, budding hardware designers learn that a software bug can easily be fixed by editing a text file and recompiling (though admittedly those who learned during the punch-card era may disagree with this attitude). But a hardware design error can be far more costly to one’s social schedule. A … Read More → "Incremental Synthesis"

Preaching to the Choir

Proselytizing Programmable Logic

by Kevin Morris

April 14, 2009

The faithful are easy. An FPGA company rolls out a new line and the bragging begins: “More LUTs, increased Fmax, Shorter PnR runs, faster MGTs!”

The faithful are impressed: “Yes! Tell us more! Have you increased the LUT width? Added more FF’s to your LEs? Diversified your mix of hardened IP blocks? Increased the BRAM ratio? ”

(The Faithful talk like that most of the time – all acrimoniously acronymic, feasting in their insider insight, devouring the minutiae with reckless abandon, disdainfully dismissing the unwashed masses.)

The rest of the world, however, … Read More → "Preaching to the Choir"