History of the Spreadsheet

In 1979, a young Harvard Business School graduate student envisioned a new methodology to effectively organize and process large amounts of data through variations of parameters to yield an exact what-if analysis of numerical models, utilizing something called a personal computer. The young graduate student, Dan Bricklin, created VisiCalc™, the first killer app for the nascent personal computer industry of the early 1980’s. Today millions of users depend on the progeny of VisiCalc, the most popular being Microsoft Excel™. Financial, scientific, … Read More → "Accelerating RTL Analysis & Creation with Spreadsheets"

The race is on. Both competitors push pedals deliberately as the brakeless bikes start moving on the highly banked oval of the velodrome. Suddenly, before they have completed a second lap, the leader pulls his bike up the slope and comes almost to a stop, trying to lure his competitor into passing him on the inside. The duel that ensues is ironically typical of two-competitor sports like sprint cycling. Each cyclist strategically maneuvers his bike to try to gain the advantageous position – just behind the other in the aerodynamic wake. Sometimes, one of the cyclists will “track … Read More → "IP to Go"

His son graduates from Junior High next week – blank it out… His wife’s car needs the oil changed – blank it out… His mother sounded tired when she called last week – blank it out… He tries to empty his conscious of all the noise, the clutter, and the dreary detail of his daily life. He blanks his mind and visualizes himself as if he were watching his own actions from a short distance away. He fast forwards several seconds into the future. He sees himself address the ball and begin the back swing. … Read More → "Spartan-3 Goes Golfing"

The Role of High-Speed Parallel I/O

As I/O standards continue to evolve toward serialization, high-speed parallel I/O still plays an important role in specific chip-to-chip applications in which either current serial technologies are cost prohibitive, or legacy demands it.

FPGAs are being used increasingly as programmable SoCs, designed-in as an integral part of the system data path supporting NPU, framer and module- based source synchronous I/O standards such as SPI 4.2, SFI 4.1, XGMII, HyperTransport and Rapid IO. However, these applications require devices capable of performing high-speed … Read More → "Bit-Based Dynamic Alignment for Multi-Gigabit Parallel I/O"

Actel’s new Igloo FPGA family is based on their popular flash-based ProASIC-3 line. In the world of FPGAs, flash offers some compelling benefits when it comes to power minimization. In developing Igloo, Actel has capitalized on those advantages and added new power management features, targeting the devices at extremely power-sensitive applications such as smart phones. While you may have never seen “mobile phone” and “FPGA” written on the same sheet of paper (unless there was a prominent negative in between), Actel seems determined to put FPGAs into these unlikeliest of sockets, attacking one of the last and strongest … Read More → "Flash Freeze"