Once upon a time, PLD pinouts were an easy thing. Oh, yeah, sorry… for you neophytes, that’s “Programmable Logic Device,” a term once ubiquitous, and still relevant, except that FPGAs are the overwhelmingly dominant survivor. So much so that some people think of PLDs as just the small non-volatile glue-mop-up devices, to paint an ugly mixed-metaphorical picture, even though an FPGA is no less programmable a device. Back in the day, when you were writing your Boolean equations in PALASM for your PAL16L8 (OK, I know I’ve lost a … Read More → "Playing Pin Twister"

We’ve talked many times about the potential of FPGAs in providing incredible amounts of the Good kind of power (computing) while consuming comparatively tiny amounts of the Bad kind of power (“juice”).  When you want a lot of numbers manipulated very quickly with the least possible amount of juice, a highly parallelized datapath implemented in the programmable fabric of an FPGA is hard to beat.  That’s why we have groups like the die-hard fringe of supercomputing – the “reconfigurable computing community” struggling for decades to build a tool infrastructure … Read More → "Merging with Agility"

While the word “ecosystem” is happily bantered about by major FPGA vendors, history would indicate that FPGA companies are less than perfect participants in the care and feeding of “ecosystems” to support their products.  The turmoil associated with the love/hate, competitor/partner, customer/supplier relationships between FPGA companies and others providing various products and services to the FPGA community are well documented. 

Commercial EDA companies are a perfect case-in-point.  While trying to make a business creating and selling design tools to FPGA designers, they need to cooperate closely with … Read More → "Synplicity Gets Spirit"

About a decade ago, FPGA design followed in the footsteps of ASIC and went language-based.  For a very long time, the only question we asked ourselves was “VHDL or Verilog?”  It was reminiscent of the “Paper or Plastic?” scenario in the grocery checkout line.  Gradually, however, people sneaked into the FPGA-designing fold that weren’t FPGA designers.  Who are these folks anyway?  We’ve got DSP engineers, embedded systems designers, board designers, supercomputing folks… the list goes on and on. 

Apparently all those new … Read More → "One to Many"