It’s four o’clock in the morning. Roger gets up from his laptop to walk to the dorm-size refrigerator in the corner of the makeshift office. He pulls out a Mountain Dew, downs a sizable swig, and then places the can at the end of a row of six empties that have accumulated beside his keyboard during the evening. Adjacent to his desk sits a pyramid of empty Mountain Dew cans – an art project in progress, a monument to a month of Roger’s late-night work-a-thons, all aimed at getting the product ready for tomorrow’ … Read More → "Innovation Big and Small"

We FPGA designers work hard to get our RTL ready to rumble. We round up our IP, mull over the microarchitecture, sweat over the simulation, and finally get things lined up well enough to push the big GO buttons for synthesis and place-and-route. After that, the design is mostly out of our hands, right? The tools do their job, and, unless we have some critical paths that need optimizing, some LUTs hanging around loose after placement, or some routes that ended up unrouted, we just sit back and wait for the system to tell us that everything … Read More → "Blaming the Button"

The massive increase in processing required for next generation compute-intensive applications, such as wireless communication and image processing, has created a gap between off-the-shelf DSP performance and market needs. In many cases, discrete DSPs are simply running out of steam to serve the new communications, multimedia, and consumer applications. In recent years, users have increasingly looked toward alternative solutions ranging from ultra-high performance full-custom ASICs to highly flexible general-purpose CPUs. Somewhere in the middle are FPGAs, providing a cost-effective balance (Figure 1) between programmability and high performance. With their processing flexibility ranging from serial to parallel computing, and … Read More → "Need to accelerate the creation of technology-independent DSP hardware?"

Multi-madness is upon us these days. Multi-core, multi-thread, and multi-processor mania has made a mess of the previously well-ordered software tools and operating systems market, creating abundant opportunities for innovation. Single processor computing is at its heat limit, and the new way to get more cpu power focused on your problem is to pile on the processors and parallelize your application.

Much has been made in the technical press about various approaches for automatically parallelizing general-purpose computing. However, there are occasional outstanding opportunities to create domain-specific solutions that can elegantly and efficiently elevate the performance of mission-critical … Read More → "Parallelizing PCB"

Over the past few years, FPGAs have risen from a whisper to a roar at the Embedded Systems Conference. This year, at the newly re-relocated event (back in San Jose after a few-year foray up to San Francisco), there was barely a booth on the show floor without boards bearing FPGAs connected to cameras, displays, LEDs, remote-control cars, bins of bouncing balls, Dance Dance Revolution sensor pads, and even to the inner-workings of our old, remarkably destructive friend Cyclonebot’s 220-pound, half-inch-plate-titanium-clad frame.

Originally, … Read More → "Undertow of Ubiquity"