Dominating FPGA clock domains and CDCs

Dominating FPGA clock domains and CDCs
by Don Dingee on 09-26-2014 at 7:00 am

Multiple clock domains in FPGAs have simplified some aspects of designs, allowing effective partitioning of logic. As FPGA architectures get more flexible in how clock domains, regions, or networks are available, the probability of signals crossing clock domains has gone way up.… Read More


Explaining HAPS-DX in an elevator

Explaining HAPS-DX in an elevator
by Don Dingee on 09-24-2014 at 7:00 am

Every development team has been through this challenge: finding a tool that looks fantastic, then heading off to the manager one or two levels up who has enough signature authority for the purchase order. Signatures for amounts reading more than a couple of trailing zeros on POs are rarely free, or painless. … Read More


Who will be “lucky dog” in 4G LTE basebands?

Who will be “lucky dog” in 4G LTE basebands?
by Don Dingee on 09-19-2014 at 5:00 pm

The official term is “beneficiary rule”, but among colorful racing broadcasters, drivers, and fans it is more commonly referred to as the “lucky dog”: the driver who is down a lap, but gets to advance to the lead lap by virtue of being farthest ahead when a caution flag is raised.

Qualcomm has lapped the entire field when it comes to … Read More


Safer SoCs for safer driving

Safer SoCs for safer driving
by Don Dingee on 09-14-2014 at 4:00 pm

Flip on the TV, and a car commercial is bound to pop up shortly touting one of two technological aspects. One is center stack integration of smartphone-style applications. The other is advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) featuring cameras, radar, and other sensors helping cars … Read More


Sidense overlays OTP on TSMC 16nm FinFET

Sidense overlays OTP on TSMC 16nm FinFET
by Don Dingee on 09-13-2014 at 7:00 am

Process shrinks, which have served us well for most of the Moore’s Law journey, are reaching their limits. For switching transistors, the biggest problems of leakage current and gate oxide vulnerability in planar MOSFETs have led the industry to new 3D microstructures such as FinFET. For non-volatile memory, the problem is generally… Read More


New details on Altera network-on-FPGA

New details on Altera network-on-FPGA
by Don Dingee on 08-28-2014 at 4:00 pm

Advantages to using NoCs in SoC design are well documented: reduced routing congestion, better performance than crossbars, improved optimization and reuse of IP, strategies for system power management, and so on. What happens when NoCs move into FPGAs, or more accurately the SoC variant combining ARM cores with programmable… Read More


Opting for ARM software scalability

Opting for ARM software scalability
by Don Dingee on 08-26-2014 at 12:00 pm

Behind much of the success of ARM architecture is a scalable software model, where in theory the same code runs on the smallest member of the family to the largest. In practice, there are profiles, and a variety of hardware execution units, and resource constraints in low power scenarios that enter the picture. As a result, operating… Read More


Secure at any IoT deed

Secure at any IoT deed
by Don Dingee on 08-25-2014 at 3:00 pm

In his classic book “Unsafe at Any Speed”, Ralph Nader assailed the auto industry and their approach to styling and cost efficiency at the expense of safety during the 1960s. He squared up on perceived defects in the Chevrolet Corvair, but extended his view to wider issues such as tire inflation ratings favoring passenger comfort… Read More


USB 3.0 IP on FinFET may stop port pinching

USB 3.0 IP on FinFET may stop port pinching
by Don Dingee on 08-19-2014 at 5:00 pm

Sometimes a standard is a victim of its own success, at least for a while as the economics catch up to the technology. When a standard like USB 3.0 is announced, with a substantial performance increase over USB 2.0, some of the use cases come on board right away. Others, where vendors enjoy a decent ROI with good-enough performance,… Read More


Another debug view in the UVM Toolbox

Another debug view in the UVM Toolbox
by Don Dingee on 08-17-2014 at 1:00 am

One of the biggest endearing qualities of a debug environment for any type of coding is availability of multiple ways to accomplish a task. Whether the preference is keyboard shortcuts, mouse left-click drill-down and right-click pull-down menus, source code view, hierarchical class view, or graphical relationship view, … Read More