The FPGA market is a multi-faceted battlefield. Particularly between the largest two suppliers, everything is a race. There is a race to reach a new process node first, a race for the largest device, a race for the highest frequency, and a race for the lowest-cost parts. Silicon-based bragging rights aren’t enough to keep the conflict interesting, however. Both Altera and Xilinx, the two market-dominant FPGA suppliers, invest huge amounts of resources in the development of tools and IP to complement their device offerings.

While not as visible as the war of the … Read More → "Altera’s Quartus II 6.0"

As advanced FPGAs have grown to ASIC proportions in terms of size and complexity, their design and verification have become correspondingly more difficult. This has driven the need for greater expertise in the design and verification of FPGAs. However, many companies, large and small, lack either the resources or the expertise for these demanding designs, so they turn to engineering service firms like A2e Technologies.

Typically projects reach us at a point in the design schedule where schedules are tight and time is of the essence. We need to get up … Read More → "On the Cutting-Edge of FPGA Design and Verification"

Innovation is a hot topic these days. We ourselves have billed innovation as “the fuel that powers technological progress” in our industry. You’d think, with the industry’s first 65nm FPGA family rolling into production, we’d be saluting another salvo of innovation and inspiration from the world’s largest FPGA company. We are, of course, but even more than that, we’re chronicling the execution of an equally important factor in high-tech success – learning. In their introduction of V5, Xilinx has shown us all that they’re a company that learns – learns from their successes, … Read More → "Virtex-5 is Alive"

We humans like to worry. Instead of being content with just living our happy lives, walking around enjoying the sunshine, eating our food, talking to each other on our mobile phones, and designing our next-generation electronic products, we mull and fuss about whatever nemesis might come along and end our little party. Will global warming overheat our junctions? Will earthquakes and volcanoes shake us into spilling our cocktails? Will comets and meteors crash into our spinning ball of fun, bringing on another ice age? With every additional year we speculate about new spoilers that might spell the end of … Read More → "Altera Readies for 65nm"

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"