Workload-tuned cores seeing greater interest

Workload-tuned cores seeing greater interest
by Don Dingee on 06-30-2013 at 10:00 pm

Is it possible to design a processor with very high performance and low power consumption? To answer that, embedded illuminati are now focusing on designs tuned to specific workloads – creating a tailored processor that does a few things very efficiently, with nothing extra.… Read More


So, where are all the EMBEDDED guys?

So, where are all the EMBEDDED guys?
by Don Dingee on 06-12-2013 at 8:15 pm

Roaming the aisles at #50DAC the past week left me with one unmistakable impression: there were two shows going on at the same time. Oh, we were all packed into one space together at the Austin Convention Center and neighboring hotels. But we weren’t quite all speaking the same language – yet.… Read More


10 years, 100,000 miles, or <1 DPM

10 years, 100,000 miles, or <1 DPM
by Don Dingee on 05-30-2013 at 10:00 pm

Auto makers have historically been accused of things like planned obsolescence – redesigning parts to make repairs painfully or even prohibitively expensive – and the “warranty time-bomb”, where major systems seem to fail about a week after the warranty expires. Optimists would chalk both those up to relentless innovation,… Read More


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