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Simplifying Storage

I was one of the early adopters of home theater PCs.  Before the concept was widespread, I had assembled a PC with an HDTV card, a good sound card, a home theater amplifier and a plasma monitor.  There were an incredible number of issues with the setup, but I was in it for the experimentation.  The vagaries of sound card inputs and outputs compared to what home equipment wanted, conversion from VGA to component video (this was years before HDMI), and getting resolutions that the video card could produce and that the plasma would accept all … Read More → "Simplifying Storage"

Expanding IP Horizons

Bricks and Mortar acquisitions are simple to conceptualize.  When Ford buys a smaller car company, we assume that the other company will carry on producing basically the same products they’ve been making for years, only under the new banner.  In many cases, the product line is not even re-branded, and many customers will not even be aware of the change.  Administrative responsibilities are re-shuffled, corporate accounting reports look different, and, beyond that, everything appears to be business as usual from the outside.

Technology acquisitions, however, particularly those involving products like software or … Read More → "Expanding IP Horizons"

Battery-Powered Proof

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"

Mediocre Embedded Systems?

“Over the last twenty five years, the general public have become self-conditioned to accept mediocrity in software-based electronic systems.” Christopher Smith, VP of Marketing at Green Hills Software, feels strongly that, not only in consumer electronics, but in other embedded and enterprise areas, there is complacency, not just among the users, but also among the developers. He fears that only something on the level of a catastrophic failure of public infrastructure will shake the industry and its customers out of that complacency. He spoke to European editor, Dick Selwood.

ETJ. When you say … Read More → "Mediocre Embedded Systems?"

Auto Market Assault

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"

Modelling From the Belly of the Whale

IBM has announced that, subject to the usual legal caveats, it is buying Telelogic, the Swedish-based system development tools company. IBM’s Rational Software operation, where Telelogic’s products will find a home, was itself acquired by IBM only four years ago. And it was only just over a year ago that Telelogic bought I-Logix, whose Rhapsody model-based development tool is one of the leaders in the embedded space. So, rather like one of those drawings of a little fish being swallowed by a bigger one and that being swallowed by one yet bigger again, Rhapsody is … Read More → "Modelling From the Belly of the Whale"

Design Tool Evolution

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"

Surveillance Silicon

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"

Lessons from a LinuxWorld

Last week at LinuxWorld in San Francisco, we saw the expected contingent of server and IT technology.  If you’re stacking lots of blades into a rack these days, chances are Linux is involved.  Of course, we’ve been talking about Linux as an embedded operating system for quite some time now as well.  Companies like Wind River have been working to make Linux a viable option for device software support for several years now.

The advent of embedded computing platforms sophisticated enough to handle the likes of Linux is a relatively … Read More → "Lessons from a LinuxWorld"

Nailing Jell-O to a Wall

Oddly, the engineering director didn’t seem as impressed as he should have been.  Perhaps he couldn’t see how well the software project was going already?  Only days into the project and it looked like it was already 80% complete or so.  The next six months would be a cake-walk.  The team obviously would finish all the required functionality as well as Marketing’s “nice to have” list.  The team leader started wondering what extra goodies the engineers would be able to slip in during their spare time.

< … Read More → "Nailing Jell-O to a Wall"
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Jul 1, 2025
I don't know which of these videos is better: humans playing games with water pixels or robots playing games....