Articles – Page 532

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"

Catapult C Synthesis Designing a JPEG Compression Engine

by Kevin Morris

October 16, 2008

High Level Synthesis technology has made it to the mainstream, but design teams often don’t know how to take advantage of these powerful tools to get the best results out of their design.

In this Chalk Talk, Amelia Dalton hosts Stuart Clubb of Mentor Graphics, and they take you through an example of designing a jpeg compression engine using Mentor Graphics Catapult C.

… Read More →

Spying on the Innards

Linux Kernel Debugging and Profiling, With and Without OCI

by Bryon Moyer

October 14, 2008

Officer McReady scratched his head in confusion. “OK, tell me again why you think Bostwick stole the papers?”

“Because, well, first of all I thought he was going to, see?” he started.

“Why did you think that?”

“Well, something was up. I had some of the documents on my desk, and Debra had some on her desk, and then they were gone. And we found them on his desk. That was just weird; why was he gathering these things … Read More → "Spying on the Innards"

Happy Birthday to Us

FPGA Journal Turns Five

by Kevin Morris

October 14, 2008

Five fabulous years after removing the “press” from “trade-press,” FPGA Journal has pushed out over 5 million e-mails, over 5 hundred original articles, over 5 thousand news stories, and dozens of webcasts through its servers. You, our audience, have told us often what you like and want – useful, interesting, and entertaining articles; a focus on topics important to engineers; objective and insightful analysis; up-to-date industry news; non-boring webcasts; and a sense of humor. Well, four out of five isn’t too bad.

Our parent company – Techfocus Media, Inc. has been good … Read More → "Happy Birthday to Us"