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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


Breaking the SoC lab walls

Breaking the SoC lab walls
by Don Dingee on 05-11-2015 at 7:00 am

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


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

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


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

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


Chips and pins and layers within

Chips and pins and layers within
by Don Dingee on 03-25-2015 at 3:00 pm

After teams sweat the details of SoC and industrial design, they turn to printed circuit board designers for magic. Here are a pile of chips and passives, and a schematic for interconnecting them. This is how much physical space the board can occupy. Connectors have to be here, and here, and mounting holes there, and there. There … Read More


How many coats cover this SoC?

How many coats cover this SoC?
by Don Dingee on 03-11-2015 at 7:00 pm

“Most interior paint covers with one coat.” Back when there was something called a newspaper, this was an actual blurb in the home improvement pages, section 3, part 8, page 5 of the Chicago Tribune on Sunday, August 13, 1961. Even then, marketers were catering to consumers looking to cut corners and save time, and one-coat coverage… Read More