Staring Down Giants
Achronix Introduces New 22nm FPGAs
It takes a lot of guts to go head to head with an established industry leader. It takes even more guts to go up against an established duopoly - directly in their most heavily fortified markets. Fighting against one giant is tricky. You have to look carefully to find a vulnerable spot and put all your energy into exploiting that vulnerability. Fighting against two different giants is a whole 'nother ballgame. What works against one opponent may not work against the other - and giants tend to be big and heavy. You don't want to get squished between them.
Wirelessly Going Where No Man Has Gone Before
Africa, Atmel and the MEMS in Between
This week's Fish Fry is all about wireless technology and how it is shaping the world today. First up, I interview Martin Squibbs from Atmel about a big announcement in the world of RF transceivers. Martin talks to me about a technology that may change the roadmap for battery-operated wireless applications in the industrial and consumer market places. Next up, I check out how wireless technology is shaping medical care in Africa, and finally I've got a short Interview with Karen Lightman about the MEMS Industry Group and how they are looking to carve out new avenues for future MEMS applications.
The Long ARM of Intel
In this week's Fish Fry, I look at Intel's ever-expanding reach into the world of electronic design. I interview Jarrod Siket about Netronome's collaboration with Intel and I also investigate the recent announcement that Intel and Xilinx will be funding R&D at EDA startup Oasys Design Systems. This week I also chat with Tom DeSchutter of Synopsys about what ARM's big.LITTLE is all about and how software can help with energy efficiency in mobile designs.
Divide (and Conquer) by Zero
ARM’s Cortex-M0+ Proves Less Is More, More or Less
Just when you think ARM can’t sink any lower, they do this.
I mean that in a good way. ARM – effectively the world’s largest microprocessor company – has come out with yet another variation on its ubiquitous CPU architectural theme. This time it’s called the Cortex-M0+ because, well, M0 was already taken.
Yes, the company has officially run out of numbers.
Solving the Big Secret
Synopsys Attacks SEUs in FPGAs
A few years ago, one FPGA vendor, Actel, was quietly shouting in the corner. “Hey! Single event upsets (SEUs) are a big problem for FPGAs!”
The other FPGA companies replied with a thoughtful technical analysis of the situation: “Hey, Actel - SHUT UP!”
OK, maybe that’s not exactly the way it went down, but the idea is basically right. You see, Actel’s history is in super-high-reliability FPGAs for use in space. Up in space, there are lots of tiny particles flying around with a lot of energy. When one of those particles hits a vulnerable part of an IC (like a storage element of some kind), it can flip the bit from one to zero or zero to one. As your razor-sharp digital design mind might be telling you right now, this is really bad.
Numbing It Down
A Mind-Boggling Stack o’ Technology
CEVA recently announced the XC-4000 family, their next generation of DSP processors for software-defined radio implementations of communications functions (if I may make bold to understate with the word “function”)
Normally, to discuss the new family, it would be standard to go through the processors and instructions and memory and bus architecture and… well, you’ve probably seen it all before. Perhaps not specifically done the way the XC-4000 – or any other particular processor – does it, but, well, it can be hard to craft a compelling narrative out of the usual “speeds and feeds.”
Shipping the Future
Altera’s 28nm FPGAs Hit the Streets
Altera announced this week that production shipments of their high-performance Stratix V 28nm FPGAs have begun. While we’ve been talking for a couple of years now about all the advantages that the 28nm node will bring to the FPGA landscape, this announcement is probably the most important sign that the rubber is actually meeting the road when it comes to delivering those benefits to the world.
A Bigger Packet Pipe
Cavium Announces OCTEON III
Multicore is familiar territory in the communications world. That application area is arguably where the most sophisticated multicore practitioners operate. Unlike other embedded areas, like cellphones – if, that is, you consider them embedded, and which are just starting to use more than one core in a real multicore way, communications infrastructure designers have been using several cores for a long time.
The reason is simple: speed. You’ve got packets flying at you at a bazillion gigaspams per second and you’ve got to deal with them before you have the entire world breathing down your neck asking why you’re clogging up the works.
MATLAB to Hardware
MathWorks Automates HDL Creation
Quick! What’s the fourth largest EDA company in the world? Most of us in the industry can rattle off the “Big 3” right? “Daisy, Mentor, Valid.” Oops, my time machine was off by about 30 years. How about “Synopsys, Mentor, Cadence”? After that, it gets a bit dicey - if we counted Magma, that would be a possibility, but we need to chalk them up to Synopsys now. For those of us who think FPGA companies are actually EDA companies with a different business model, Xilinx and Altera would be in the top four or five. Beyond that, it drops off -- a lot.
When Things Start to Think
Redpine’s M2M Module Eases Machine Communication
The title this week is borrowed from the book by Neil Gershenfeld, which includes one of the best descriptions of embedded systems that I’ve ever read. It’s also a good introduction to microcontrollers and embedded software for your nontechnical friends who wonder what you do for a living.
Part of what we do, of course, is to plot world domination by cybernetic organisms. I, for one, welcome our robot overlords and always do my part to hasten their ascendancy. And what good is a robot army without a good means of communication? If Napoleon’s army traveled on its stomach, surely the next one will travel on the airwaves, using wireless communications protocols to further their manifest ends.