Four years, more than 200 weekly newsletters, hundreds of product announcements, briefings, interviews, conferences, and trade shows – for a four-year-old, FPGA Journal has really been around the block.  When we launched this publication in 2003, we had high hopes for a bright future for our innovative approach to technology journalism.  We had no idea, however, how well things would go.  In short order we had written our own book – and dispensed with all the paper — on delivering interesting high-quality technical content to an audience of engineers.

Apparently, most of you agreed, because our audience … Read More → "Happy Birthday!"

Perhaps the most under-appreciated technologies in the FPGA design flow are logic synthesis and physical layout.  Most of us download the vendors’ tools, grab some IP, whip up a little RTL, push the button, and wait around for our timing report to say “Pass”.  After all, that’s the easiest thing to do, and following the path of least resistance is highly attractive when so many tasks on the critical path of our project are prohibitively difficult.

We have basically no choice on layout tools.  Unlike in the ASIC world, … Read More → "Pumping Up Precision"

Last week, in “ARM and Altera – Why You Should Care,” we looked at the announcement of an Altera Cyclone III development kit for the ARM Cortex M1 soft-core processor.  We discussed ARM’s quiet conquest of the market for embedded computing with FPGAs and how the Cyclone III announcement moved the IP core from niche player to mainstream programmable logic platform.  This week, we discuss Actel’s announcement of a focus on handheld and portable applications.  As we discussed in our “Battery-Powered Proof” feature two weeks ago, FPGAs have … Read More → "Low Power Processing"

FPGAs are power-hungry monsters, right?  We all learned this ten years ago, and un-learning it sometimes seems beyond the capabilities of the electronic design community.  We plod along with our pre-conceptions, patiently ignoring the evolving reality.  In truth, low-power FPGAs have been available for years now.  Depending on your application, you can find a programmable logic device that fits just about any power budget.  Ask the average designer on the street, though, and you’ll usually get the same response: “We couldn’t use an FPGA in our design because, you … Read More → "Battery-Powered Proof"

With today’s automobiles acting as mass-produced rolling showcases of electronic technology, winning sockets in automotive electronics applications has become a major goal of just about every semiconductor company.  The draw is enormous.  In many countries, consumers pour a huge chunk of their monthly budgets into automobiles, and the percentage of that money that flows into electronics is also rapidly increasing.  We have reached a sweet spot in electronic technology capabilities where the number of new, useful features that can be added to automobiles with advanced electronics is exploding. 

FPGA and programmable … Read More → "Auto Market Assault"