You can tune a piano, but you can’t tune a cache without help

You can tune a piano, but you can’t tune a cache without help
by Don Dingee on 05-30-2013 at 8:30 pm

Once upon a time, designing a product with a first generation SoC on board, we were trying to use two different I/O peripherals simultaneously. Seemed simple enough, but things just flat out didn’t work. After days spent on RTFM (re-reading the fine manual), we found ourselves at the absolute last resort: ask our FAE.

After about… Read More


The never-ending quest to kill metastability

The never-ending quest to kill metastability
by Don Dingee on 05-28-2013 at 4:00 pm

The difficulty of an engineering problem can be gauged by two things:
1) The number of attempts to generate a solution.
2) The degree of hyperbole used to describe the effectiveness of the latest solution.

The problem many folks in the EDA industry are after right now is clock domain crossings (CDCs) and the resulting metastability… Read More


It’s all in the details of FPGA requirements management

It’s all in the details of FPGA requirements management
by Don Dingee on 05-23-2013 at 8:30 pm

Word association: if I said “requirements management”, you’d probably say IBM Rational “DOORS,” or maybe Serena or Polarion if you come from the IT world. But what if the requirements you need to manage are for an FPGA or ASIC, with HDL and testbench code and waveform files and more details backing verification, and compliance… Read More


A random walk down OS-VVM

A random walk down OS-VVM
by Don Dingee on 05-13-2013 at 11:14 am

Unlike one prevailing theory of financial markets, digital designs definitely don’t function or evolve randomly. But many engineers have bought into the theory that designs can be completely tested randomly. Certainly there is value to randomness, exercising all combinations of inputs, including unexpected ones a designer… Read More


Beyond one FPGA comfort zone

Beyond one FPGA comfort zone
by Don Dingee on 04-29-2013 at 5:00 pm

Unless you are a small company with one design team, the chance you have standardized on one FPGA vendor for all your needs, forever and ever, is unlikely. No doubt you probably have a favorite, because of the specific class of part you use most often or the tool you are most familiar with, but I’d bet you use more than one FPGA vendor routinely.… Read More


When installing a sink, it’s a lot faster to buy a saw

When installing a sink, it’s a lot faster to buy a saw
by Don Dingee on 04-25-2013 at 8:10 pm

Mentor’s announcement from Design West this week pretty much signals the end of standalone ESL tools, in favor of more useful stuff. They have pulled the pieces of their Sourcery CodeBench environment along with their embedded Linux offering and their Vista virtual prototyping platform into a native embedded software development… Read More


Gigahertz FFT rates on a 500MHz budget

Gigahertz FFT rates on a 500MHz budget
by Don Dingee on 04-23-2013 at 8:30 pm

A basic building block of any communication system today is the fast Fourier transform, or FFT. A big advantage of FPGA implementations of FFTs is they can be scaled and tuned for the task at hand, optimizing data flow, resource use, and power consumption. Scaled, that is, up to the clock speed of the FPGA – or so it would seem.

Today’s… Read More


The Nokia Diet: shedding pounds and adding margin

The Nokia Diet: shedding pounds and adding margin
by Don Dingee on 04-18-2013 at 12:40 pm

I was trying to find the comment one of my counterparts here made eight months ago that given the cash burn rate, Nokia would be out of business in eight months, so I could gloat a bit. Bzzzzzzt – cash position actually increased in 1Q13. The numbers tell a painful story about a company on a difficult diet to survive, one that analysts… Read More


Power integrity: ground, and other fairy tales

Power integrity: ground, and other fairy tales
by Don Dingee on 03-31-2013 at 8:30 pm

Ground. It’s that little downward-pointing triangle that somehow works miracles on every schematic. It looks very simple until one has to tackle modern power distribution network (PDN) design on a board with high speed and high power draw components, and you soon discover ground is a complicated fairy tale with a lot of influences.… Read More


Signal integrity: more than just SerDes analysis

Signal integrity: more than just SerDes analysis
by Don Dingee on 03-29-2013 at 1:00 am

When Cadence acquired Sigrity in 2012, two motives were involved: get more competitive in state of the art signal integrity analysis, and grab a foothold into the other vendor’s PCB flows in an area that is developing as a real sore spot for digital designers.

Just as the days where PCB tape-out meant actually using tape are over, … Read More