Articles – Page 530

November 4, 2008

What do you get when you multiply a normal FPGA by .000000001? Well, those of you that have been reading this publication for awhile may jump right in with the observation that this is a floating-point operation, and since FPGA math would normally need to be fixed-point, we will have to “quantize” before we get started. Fair enough.

As you also probably know, quantization is the process of approximating a vast range of continuous values by a comparatively small set of discrete ones. We choose the range of values we’re … Read More → "Tiny Tiny Chips"

Making More of a Contribution

Increasing Embedded’s Influence on Linux

by Bryon Moyer

November 4, 2008

Peer review is a well-established essential component of the scientific process. For good science, anyway. The system provides a way for new ideas to be vetted and tested rather than being foisted immediately on a public that is all too willing to accept at face value the pronouncements of anyone calling him- or herself a scientist.

The same idea, albeit with somewhat different aims, plays a part in the open source world, where code gets posted and reviewed by peers in order to ensure that the code actually does what is claimed, has no bugs, is well … Read More → "Making More of a Contribution"

Spicing Up Simulation

Infinisim and Gemini Enter the Analog Fray

by Bryon Moyer

November 4, 2008

In yet another example of the ascendance of analog considerations, simulation of analog behavior – whether in outright analog circuits or in the secret analog life of digital circuits – has risen to the level of problem that needs solving. SPICE is the mother’s milk of analog simulation, but, in the spirit of actually getting things done in a finite amount of time, SPICE has been divided into the “Fast SPICE” side of things, where you trade off some accuracy for the ability to see results sooner, and full SPICE, which takes longer to run … Read More → "Spicing Up Simulation"

The Haunting of Fab 51

Nightmare at Thirty-two Nanometers

by Kevin Morris

October 28, 2008

The wild wind whistles strange through the bright gloom of eternal daylight in the tightly-sealed semiconductor fab. In the power-assured place where progress never pauses – where cryptically-coded wafers plod persistently through mysterious machines in the acrid vacuum of the billion-dollar bay-and-chase clean room – where white-suited phantoms pass silicon slices through evil rays and deadly potions and spinning saws… something is amiss.

In the nooks and crannies of nanometer features – in the spaces between the spaces – in the places where the design rule checkers never checked, engineers never engineered, and vectors never … Read More → "The Haunting of Fab 51"

Through the Looking Glass

And What Cadence Found There

by Bryon Moyer

October 28, 2008

Passing beyond a looking glass has been a useful metaphor for any topsy-turvy, head-spinning, when-will-this-trip-be-over, bizarro-world experience ever since Lewis Carroll bestowed it upon us. It’s that feeling that you’re stuck in a strange dream somewhere, where croquet balls unroll and run away, queens chop heads off willy-nilly (OK, to be fair, she didn’t chop them off… she had people that were supposed to do that), where what should make sense doesn’t and what shouldn’t does.

The looking-glass concept can be applied on three levels within … Read More → "Through the Looking Glass"

Blasting Billions of Bits

Xilinx Introduces Virtex-5 TXT

by Kevin Morris

October 28, 2008

The other day, I was killing five minutes between briefings by watching a YouTube video on my iPhone. Right in the middle of the video (the funniest part, in fact) my viewing was interrupted by a text message from my wife (a photographer by trade). The message read:

“Looks like my Terabyte is full.”

As we go through our day-to-day lives, our perspective on certain things shifts gradually – sometimes too slowly for us to notice. For most of my life, I’ve lived in a reality that includes Moore& … Read More → "Blasting Billions of Bits"

Towards a More Human Machine

And This Has Nothing to do With Machine Intelligence

by Bryon Moyer

October 28, 2008

The human body and the set of biological processes we collectively refer to as “life” bear little resemblance to any real machine. We attempt to synthesize the complexity of the natural world but in fact have done so only on the fringes, in marginal, limited contexts. Undaunted, we anthropomorphize with respect to our creations, crowing about their ability to listen, see, hibernate, snooze, sleep, wake up.

These particular verbs feature prominently in discussions of power savings, where various approaches are combined to effect a reduction in a system’s appetite for energy. While the … Read More → "Towards a More Human Machine"

Reservations Required

Mentor Parallelizes Analysis and Optimization

by Bryon Moyer

October 21, 2008

Man at the head of the line: Table for three please?

Maitre D’: Bien sur. Ees your party all ‘ere?

Man: Yup.

Maitre D’: Alors, we are full now, so I put your name on ze leest. I cannot say whahn your name weell be call; it dehpond on the size of your partee, available tehbell, ‘ow many tehbell are full at each stehshahn, etceterah. I … Read More → "Reservations Required"

Trying to Keep Big Things in Little Packages

ThreadX Finds a Comfortable Home on FPGAs

by Bryon Moyer

October 21, 2008

Embedded has always been something of a mixed blessing on FPGAs. Certainly FPGAs feature prominently in many embedded systems, but they rarely take the central computing stage. Why? One word: performance.

There are two ways to implement a processor on an FPGA. The most prevalent is to use a soft core like Nios (Altera), MicroBlaze (Xilinx), ARM (Actel, Altera), Coldfire (Altera), or Mico32 (Lattice; open). The alternative is to use one of the built-in PowerPC processors on the high-end Virtex devices from Xilinx.

The soft core approach is often more appealing for FPGA vendors because … Read More → "Trying to Keep Big Things in Little Packages"

Toshiba Grows a Prefrontal Cortex

by Jim Turley

October 21, 2008

To no one’s great surprise, there’s yet another new ARM chip available in the market. This time the perpetrator is Toshiba, and its lyrically named TMPM330FDFG is a new low-cost microcontroller based on the Cortex-M3 processor design.

The new chip marks Toshiba’s first step into the world of ARM Cortex-M3 processors. The company has certainly produced its share of microprocessors and microcontrollers before – probably numbering in the billions by now – but never one based on ARM’s newish low-end architecture. It’s a move designed to … Read More → "Toshiba Grows a Prefrontal Cortex"