It’s no accident that PCB design was one of the first electronics design tasks to which computer technology was applied in an effort to automate the process. The EDA industry really had its roots in the need to handle the explosion in circuit complexity brought about by the advent of digital electronics and, in particular, the rise of the microprocessor in electronics design. Traditional manual design techniques became too cumbersome to manage when faced with the onslaught of higher pin counts, multi-line signal buses and growing numbers of board layers.

Today it’s unthinkable … Read More → "Design Tool Evolution"

These days, a number of companies are ferociously burning venture capital in order to develop new programmable architectures that offer a better tradeoff in the performance/power/cost space than existing devices such as traditional von Neumann processors or FPGAs.  Typically, these architectures attempt to parallelize the processing problem with cleverly connected redundant hardware.  In order to obtain their venture capital, these companies produce sophisticated and complex PowerPoint propaganda describing in detail (or so it seems) how their path to parallelism outperforms existing architectures by factors ranging from two to two thousand. 

Savvy venture … Read More → "Surveillance Silicon"

System Management has historically been a topic of concern for high-end systems.  For designers of low-cost, single-board applications, “system management” often consisted of a couple of 9V battery clips, an FET, an LED, and some bailing wire.  However, the proliferation of sophisticated technology into low-end systems, combined with the increasingly urgent need for power efficiency, has moved true system management issues right down into the realm of the single-boarders.

Many single board systems today are getting into big-league system management requirements with multiple power supplies in a variety of voltages, power management, thermal … Read More → "Cheap Chip-Keeping"

Introduction

Insatiable demand for high definition video and rapidly proliferating video production and distribution methods are driving the need for advanced video encoding and compression schemes. Several international standards and forums have been established in recent years to deal with various aspects of digital video encoding. The MPEG-4 Part10/H.264 encoding standard is useful in a wide range of professional video applications including broadcast head-end, IPTV, multi-stream encoding / decoding, and image processing, among others.

The standard provides for a higher level—and wider range—of compression and quality of the compressed … Read More → "FPOAs Meet the Challenges of H.264 Encoding of High Definition Video"

Last week we examined the legacy of the LUT – the basic building block that defines the very fabric of FPGAs.  Surprisingly, however, the primary driver of attributes such as cost, power consumption, and utility in FPGAs is not the fabric itself, but the choice of I/O for the device.  You see, while the internal logic keeps shrinking, some of the I/O structures don’t really scale well – things like bonding pads and higher-current transistors don’t track Moore’s Law, so the cost of an individual I/O compared with … Read More → "I/O-topia"