Power When You Need It
Aldec Harnesses Massive Server Capacity
Warning! We are going to say the “C” word in this article. If you can’t take it, just stop reading now and save yourself a lot of heartache and grief. We know a lot of you are sensitive on this topic and have deep-rooted emotional issues about it. Our advice is to seek professional counseling.
For those of you who are less delicate (we assume you’re still reading), we proudly present a system that has the potential to accelerate your design verification efforts beyond anything you could currently achieve. You know how it goes. You do your initial debugging just fine with your local copy of your favorite HDL simulator, but then you reach a point in your project where you need to crank some serious vectors through that bad boy. That’s when it gets tricky.
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.
RTOS Smackdown
In this week’s Fish Fry, I investigate the battle brewing (in press releases at least) between Green Hills and QNX and why this may not be the first time this sort of thing has happened. I interview Jeff Jussel (element14) about their "knode" and how exactly element14 fits into the grand scheme of electronic design. As a precursor to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week, I also check out one of the strangest pieces of embedded design for consumers that I have ever seen.
VisionTech's Dirty Dealings in ICs
In this week's Fish Fry, I dig into the dirty dealings of component house VisionTech. I investigate how one company from Clearwater Florida managed to dupe over a thousand unsuspecting customers out of $16 Million dollars and how these counterfeit ICs have affected our industry.
I also have an Amazon.com gift certificate to give out this week, but you'll have to listen to find out how you can win.
Lessons from Fukushima
In August a group of experts on risk, safety engineering, and related matters looked at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station disaster to see what broader lessons could be learned. Before we start reviewing some of the broader topics that arose in the workshop, please look at the exam paper below.
Examination: Safety and Systems
Your exam starts now. Please answer all the questions in this paper in a way that will satisfy any party with any interest, legitimate or otherwise, and that, in ten years, twenty years or fifty years, will not leave room for you to be blamed if your answer subsequently proves to be wrong. Remember, people’s lives and property will depend on your answer.
Faster Floating-Point
Altera Smooths Path to Floating-Point FPGA
We’ve done dozens of articles about how awesome FPGAs are for signal processing applications - with a measure of salt. We’ve pointed and laughed as FPGA vendors boasted of their gaggles of GMACs that nobody would ever realize with a practical DSP design. We raised an eyebrow when they told us how easy their DSP design flow for FPGAs was - heck, even a software guy could do it. Not. We even scrutinized (with suspicion) their high-level synthesis methodologies, and were typically less than flabbergasted at the complexity that sat right beneath the surface.
A Maze of Twisty Little Passages
An Attempt at Understanding the Basics of DO-254
We recently invoked the fear of slipshod software programming as we attempted to slog through the maze of safety-critical standards facing software engineers.
But guess what: programmers aren’t the only ones capable of turning out shoddy goods. Hardware engineers can, also. But, unlike the software world, the focus in the hardware world seems to be more squarely on one standard: DO-254.
DO-254 appears to have much in common (other than origin) with DO-178. So much so, in fact, that I found a DO-254 blog site with FAQs that appeared to be copied verbatim from a set of DO-178 FAQs, with a sloppy job of search-and-replace that left such odd statements as “avionics systems are comprised of both hardware and hardware.”
Certifiable Software
Trying to Make Sense of the Dizzying Number of Language and Coding Standards
Be afraid.
Be very afraid.
That car you’re driving? There’s probably a bug in the control software that could, at any moment, introduce you to that big rig over there at 70 mph. Oh, that would be 140-mph closing speed. Woohoo!
The power grid that’s supplying the juice to the computer you’re reading this on? (Or supplied it yesterday if you’re on battery power, wise guy?) Don’t count on it when the going gets rough… Someone has assuredly planted electronic time bombs that will kill the current to your refrigerator right before you’ll need that cold beer at 2:01 AM when the liquor store has just closed.
Cloak and Smoke and Dagger and Mirrors
Debunking the Debacle of FPGA Security
“Heeeyyy, them’s some real nice FPGAs you got there.”
“Why, thank you.”
“Yeah, my brother and me - we was just discussin’ how you got yourself all them nice FPGAs, and how it would be a shame if somethin’ bad was to happen to ‘em.”
“Bad? What do you mean?”
“Well, y’know - like if somebody was to bust your security and get in there and, uh, y’know, steal all yer design stuff.”
“Well, we’ve got a lot of security features built in to protect us.”
“Yeah, see, that’s what we wanted to discuss with you. My brother, he’s pretty good at breakin’ security stuff, and so we was playin’ with them FPGAs of yours and... Boom! We busted right through that security. We, uh, published some papers on it so everybody could see how we done it.”
Gearing Up for Rain
New Soft-Error-Tolerant Circuits
We don’t seem to mind the rain much. I mean, yeah, we’ll carry an umbrella if we think it might rain (except for places like Seattle where an umbrella is the signature of the tourist). But, to that point, really… what’s the harm of a little water?
A lot of water can be a problem. We’re not fish, after all. But a few drops in the hair is a long way from a long, cool drink in Lake Superior. Heck, we’ll even survive a dousing with a few gallons of Gatorade; pour it on!