Making sure the hardware version of your DSP algorithm is doing what you want can be a difficult task – particularly if you are doing high-performance algorithms that require hardware accelaneration in FPGAs. </ … Read More → "CHALK TALK – Simplified Verification of DSP Algorithms in Hardware"
In this webcast, Amelia Dalton talks with Mark Moran from Xilinx about using low cost FPGAs to reduce total system cost in your next design. It turns out that saving money on the FPGA is … Read More → "CHALK TALK – Lowering System Cost Made Easy with Extended Spartan -3A Family"
Evaluating any EDA tool has several challenges. You have several tools and vendors to choose from. You have to get past the marketing hype to determine what is really important to you and whether the supported feature set meets your requirements. Finally, you have to make sure that the features you need perform as advertised. And, of course, you have to do this evaluation while juggling all your other tasks.
Evaluating … Read More → "Evaluating a Design Data Management System"
Last summer we took a look at the fact that formal verification is seeing something of a repositioning and resurgence. The holiest of holies is the ability to verify that all possible use cases of a piece of logic have been specified and that all possible outcomes of those use cases have been verified to operate as desired.
It can be viewed as a big jump from no formal verification to the complete set; it’ … Read More → "Acquiring More Addicts"
This was going to be such a simple piece: a quick look at some of the developments in the use of open source in the embedded arena, a quick update on Eclipse, perhaps a comparison of the positive and negative aspects of open source compared with proprietary tools, and a final summary.
Unfortunately, I began to become more and more aware that the open source landscape is changing and that a new paradigm is appearing. The Oxford English Dictionary defines paradigm as “a pattern or model, an exemplar.” I am using it here, not in … Read More → "Penguins, Bees, Cathedrals and Wikis"
When Xilinx and Altera made their recent announcements of new low-cost, SerDes-havin’ FPGA families, we pointed out that Lattice Semiconductor had started this pie-fight a couple of years back when they introduced ECP2M – the first low-cost FPGA platform with multi-gigabit serial transceivers. Now that they have taunted the two bigger players into the melee, Lattice is raising the stakes with a brand-new family that boasts more performance, higher density, less power, and more on-chip memory than its sand-kicking predecessor.
The new ECP3, fabricated on Fujitsu’s … Read More → "Lattice Strikes Back"
Have you ever wanted to spend vast amounts of time in a conference room, real or virtual, arguing about the precise meanings of words? Trying to accommodate the strongly expressed and sometimes incompatible views of people, some of whom know less than they think they do about the subject in hand, a subject you are knowledgeable on and feel strongly about? When you have reached a conclusion, are you then happy to sit back for months, while even more people express even more views on how you got it wrong, how what has emerged doesn’t meet the … Read More → "Standardising on Analogue"
They’d been digging for only a couple weeks, with laborious care to make sure they didn’t inadvertently destroy that which had lain in quiet repose for centuries. Even so, the outlines of a once-thriving community were starting to reveal themselves. The job right now was to remove the dirt – and only the dirt – and then map out the structures and artifacts as they found them. Creating an outline of the habitation was more or less straightforward – anyone with a reasonably organized mind could come in and identify walls, openings, firepits, and … Read More → "Software Archeology"
Printed circuit board (PCB) design software is one of the oldest segments of electronic design automation (EDA). Long before people were doing synthesis, formal verification, HDL simulation, or most of the other modern design automation processes, tools were around that helped us automate the design and layout of our PCBs. Today’s PCB tools carry the legacy of that long history – both conceptually and, in some cases, literally. Some of today’s PCB tools still carry pre-historic code that was developed long before… well, before FPGAs came along, for example.
Why should we care … Read More → "Mind the Gap"
Flash memory is cool to keep around because it’s non-volatile, it’s small, it’s convenient, and, dressed up in all manner of stickwear, well, who can deny that it’s just so darn cute. But peel back those outer attractive layers, and you find much complexity lurking within. For, while we like to think of them as just another memory that we can plug into our PCs, in fact they’re nothing like it. A surprising amount of work goes into writing and reading the gotcha picture you took of grandma stashing … Read More → "Maximizing Flash Lifetimes"
