Author: Don Dingee

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Taking prototyping beyond prototypes

Taking prototyping beyond prototypes
by Don Dingee on 07-22-2015 at 12:00 pm
Categories: EDA, FPGA, S2C EDA

Everyone has heard the expression, “Half the job is having the right tool.” In the case of FPGA-based prototyping, however, the right tool for the job is only the beginning. What teams really need to think through is what exactly should be done with an FPGA-based prototyping tool?

The obvious answer is prototyping an SoC, pre-silicon.… Read More

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Xilinx in an ARM-fueled post-Altera world

Xilinx in an ARM-fueled post-Altera world
by Don Dingee on 06-29-2015 at 5:30 pm
Categories: Arm, FPGA, Xilinx

When the news broke about the on, off, and on-again Intel-Altera merger a few weeks ago, I checked off another box on my Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon scorecard. That plus a $5 bill gets me a Happy Meal at McDonalds, but in a post-Altera world, it might be worth more.

On January 16, 2008, I’m sitting in a meeting with some Intel strategic marketing… Read More

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DDR stands for Don’t Do (Just) RTL

DDR stands for Don’t Do (Just) RTL
by Don Dingee on 06-16-2015 at 9:00 pm
Categories: EDA, Synopsys

In optimizing SoC design for performance, there is so much focus on how fast a CPU core is, or a GPU core, or peripherals, or even the efficiency of the chip-level interconnect. Most designers also understand selecting high performance memory at a cost sweet spot, and optimizing physical layout to clock it as fast as possible within… Read More

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5 Things Chipmakers Are Missing on the IoT

5 Things Chipmakers Are Missing on the IoT
by Don Dingee on 06-07-2015 at 7:00 pm
Categories: General, IoT

When the RISC movement surfaced in 1982, researchers analyzed UNIX to discover what instructions multi-user code was actually using, and then designed an instruction set and execution pipeline to do that better. Fewer instructions meant fewer transistors, which led to less power consumption – although in the original… Read More

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Aldec packs 6 UltraScale parts on HES-7

Aldec packs 6 UltraScale parts on HES-7
by Don Dingee on 06-01-2015 at 12:00 pm
Categories: Aldec, EDA, FPGA

A few months ago, when the Xilinx UltraScale VU440 FPGA began shipping, one of the immediate claims was a quad-FPGA-based prototyping board touted as “Godzilla’s Butcher on Steroids”. That was a refreshing and creative PR approach, frankly. I’m always careful with less creative terms like “world’s biggest” or “world’s fastest”,… Read More

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Virtual HIL and the 100M LOC car

Virtual HIL and the 100M LOC car
by Don Dingee on 05-28-2015 at 7:00 pm
Categories: Automotive, EDA, Synopsys

Aerospace and defense applications have traditionally leveraged hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing to overcome several issues. A big one is how expensive the physical system is. Even breaking down the system into subsystems for test can still be too expensive when fielding more than a couple test stations. Modeling elements… Read More

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NFV opens gate for ARM server stampede

NFV opens gate for ARM server stampede
by Don Dingee on 05-20-2015 at 5:00 pm
Categories: Arm, IoT, IP

A couple of years ago, our own Paul McLellan gave us a report on the 2013 Linley Microprocessor Conference with a provocative headline: “Server Shift to ARM Becomes a Stampede”, a title right off one of the Linley slides. 64-bit ARMv8 architecture was relatively new to the game, and ARM share in networking platforms was just a sliver… Read More

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Breaking the SoC lab walls

Breaking the SoC lab walls
by Don Dingee on 05-11-2015 at 7:00 am
Categories: EDA, FPGA, S2C EDA

There used to be this thing called the “computer lab”, with glowing rows of terminals connected to a mainframe or minicomputer. Computers required a lot of care and feeding, with massive cooling and power requirements. Microprocessors and personal computers appeared in the 1970s, with much smaller and less expensive machines… Read More

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New Vivado release goes from Lab to UltraScale

New Vivado release goes from Lab to UltraScale
by Don Dingee on 05-06-2015 at 1:00 am
Categories: FPGA, Xilinx

Xilinx users will welcome the brand-new release of Vivado Design Suite 2015.1. For openers, device support for the latest FPGAs in the UltraScale family – XCVU440, XCVU190, and XCVU125 – has been added in the release, and early access code for the XCVU160 is available from a local Xilinx FAE. Installation has been streamlined, … Read More

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S2C eyeing 1B gate FPGA-based prototypes

S2C eyeing 1B gate FPGA-based prototypes
by Don Dingee on 04-21-2015 at 1:00 pm
Categories: EDA, FPGA, S2C EDA

We hear a lot about FPGA-based prototyping hardware: Aldec, Dini Group, PRO DESIGN, Synopsys, and others. So, why is today’s news on a new platform from S2C important? It’s a matter of intent, beyond the act of gluing a few large FPGAs on a board for customers to dump more and more prospective RTL into.

Size differences aside, each … Read More