Power, Price, and Performance – in the old days, every new click of Moore’s law gave us all three, automatically.  Shrink the gates and you can fit more of ‘em in the same space, they switch faster, and you can drop your supply voltage, saving power.  As we passed down into double-digit nanometers, however, we started having to compromise more.  Now, we have to pick just two out of the three “Ps” of Moore’s Law.

Altera is perfectly content with that state of affairs, as they have … Read More → "Cyclone III"

Introduction

Incremental design is a useful capability when implemented properly. Unfortunately, due to the naming schemes employed by logic synthesis tools, confusion arises over what in the design has actually changed. What is needed is an algorithm that deterministically creates names for generated logic elements, simplifying the task of correctly identifying what has changed at each cycle.

For the incremental design flow illustrated in Figure 1 to be most effective, minor changes should be made to the design at each incremental turn to allow the reuse of the place-and-route data generated during the previous … Read More → "Deterministic Name Generation for Incremental Synthesis"

The wild winds of winter have ravaged the technology plains with bitter cold, their icy breath wearing thin the layer of protective press releases lovingly laid down to protect the crops during the dormant days of digital design.   Groggy-headed marketers return from Maui and the extra-worldly environment of their sales kickoff events to face the bleak reality of product releases awaiting their magic touch.  The frozen pond of high-tech public relations may look barren today, but a barrage of activity blossoms just beneath the surface.  The technology universe, too, is tilted on its axis, and … Read More → "The First FPGAs of Spring"

FPGAs, possibly the most powerful processors in existence today by many measures, were never intended to be processors at all. Conceived as general-purpose programmable logic devices, their simple arrays of logic elements were not designed to accelerate computationally intensive tasks. Instead, they fell into the role in a Rube-Goldbergian fashion – evolving their processing prowess over a decade or more with engineering’s version of emergent behavior rather than ground-up purposeful design.

Today, FPGAs are used in many applications for heavy lifting chores such as video processing, often paired with conventional processors charged with handling the … Read More → "DSP to a Different Drummer"

Automotive electronics system development teams increasingly grapplewith the challenges of new industry standards and product features. An automotive vision system is an example of a design that must deliver improved performance, system integration and security.  In turn, these requirements dictate the use of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices in an automotive vision system.

Many of the automotive vision systems now being developed specify several cameras in the design for different views, such as reverse, side and forward (Figure 1).  Depending on the application, the system designer can choose from among several types of … Read More → "Reprogrammable Logic Drives Automotive Vision Systems Design"

Non-volatile FPGA is one of today’s oddest market segments. Bound by the ill-defined characteristic of “non-volatility,” the field of available devices is diverse from the ground up, with strikingly different architectures, approaches, and benefits. Actel, long the leader in non-volatile FPGAs, began with antifuse technology (which is one-time programmable) and followed later with flash-based FPGAs. QuickLogic fielded an antifuse-type approach from the beginning, and Lattice Semiconductor joined the fray over a year ago with their LatticeXP hybrid devices, embedding a flash boot PROM on the FPGA for rapid, on-chip configuration.

In announcing their … Read More → "Short Stack with Syrup"