Integrating PCB and FPGA Constraints
August 22, 2006
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A Mile in Their Shoes
August 22, 2006
Much of Nick Martin’s day is like the typical workday of any large company CEO. Nick attends meetings, talks with the press and analysts about the company’s products and performance, works to drive corporate and product strategy, and even stops to eat occasionally. Where Nick’s path diverges sharply from the norm is that you just might also find him sitting in front of a multi-monitor machine running Altium Designer (the company’s flagship, end-to-end electronic design software package), trying to finish up the last details of a board he’s designing. This is not just some … Read More → "A Mile in Their Shoes"
A Mile in Their Shoes
August 22, 2006
At some level, the business of running any big international corporation is largely the same. In high technology, however, the mundanity of macromanaging a large organization often insulates executives from the actual technology challenges faced by both their customers and their own engineers. At Altium, they do things a little differently. Nick is an electronics engineer at heart, and his company provides design automation software aimed at helping the average working engineer get his job done better and faster. In order to accomplish that goal, Nick feels that everyone working to deliver that capability, himself included, needs to walk … Read More → "A Mile in Their Shoes"
Forgotten Battles
August 15, 2006
I pushed the button to turn off the night vision scope, but the eerie greenish image of the Utah desert landscape persisted. The characteristic cloud of sparkling noise continued to dance in my viewfinder making it look like the desert had been invaded by an army of crazed fireflies. Otherwise, the scene was devoid of any movement from the nocturnal desert life I had been seeking.
Somewhere, possibly thousands of miles away and maybe dead by now, there is an engineer for whom the design of this particular scope was a major project – someone who fought with … Read More → "Forgotten Battles"
Forgotten Battles
August 15, 2006
Somewhere, possibly thousands of miles away and maybe dead by now, there is an engineer for whom the design of this particular scope was a major project – someone who fought with colleagues over issues like the choice of materials in the image sensor, the scheme for light amplification, and the design of the power supply. Perhaps the project was some cold-war-era Soviet skunkworks design. Unlike me, this engineer understands (or understood) almost instinctively why this device continues to operate for several minutes after it is powered down. His story, however, is probably long forgotten.
It was the … Read More → "Forgotten Battles"
MIPS for your Media Room
August 15, 2006
With HDTV now making the transition from exotic to ordinary, consumers naturally expect the audio portion of their experience to keep pace with the vast improvement in video quality. While stereo, lower-fidelity sound might have been perfectly acceptable with standard definition television and movie programming, the consumer’s standard for acceptable audio performance is elevated considerably by the act of plunking down a few thousand for the latest-generation plasma or DLP monitors with HDTV tuners and DVRs. Chances are, they’ve got a similarly expensive sound system with way more than two channels eagerly awaiting top-quality content … Read More → "MIPS for your Media Room"
Critical Commoditization
August 8, 2006
The fortress of an established FPGA company has many walls. One side is defended by the incredible cost of creating a competitive programmable logic architecture in a cutting-edge process geometry. With the leverage of a process node or two between you and your competitors, you can successfully fend off an attack by a less-established company simply by being in production with a line of parts on the current smallest geometry available. However, the basic architectures of programmable logic are now fairly well known and not well defended by current patents, so anybody with good business sense, a … Read More → "Critical Commoditization"
Wind River Zooms In
August 8, 2006
This time, Wind River is touting a new release of their “Commercial Grade Linux” product line. WR’s Linux offering is always based on an unmodified version of Linux (in this case 2.6.14 replacing the company’s previously-supported 2.6.10). As such, each new Wind River release gains the benefits of the new Linux release in addition to the new features and patches that WR has included in its add-ons. According to the company’s announcement, 2.6.14 includes ” …hardware-specific drivers for additional processors and boards, updates to development tools, real-time performance and scheduling-related patches, high resolution timer patches, security, networking updates to … Read More → "Wind River Zooms In"
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