The announcement today that Intel will be a Foundry for Altera at 14nm is a significant turning point for the Semiconductor Industry and Intel’s Foundry fortunes of which the full ramifications are not likely to be understood by analysts. As a long time follower of Intel and a former co-founder of an FPGA startup (Cswitch), it has… Read More
Help, my IP has fallen and can’t get up
We’ve been talking about the different technologies for FPGA-based SoC prototyping a lot here in SemiWiki. On the surface, the recent stories all start off pretty much the same: big box, Xilinx Virtex-7, wanna go fast and see more of what’s going on in the design. This is not another one of those stories. I recently sat down with Mick… Read More
Zynq out of the box, in FPGA-based prototyping
Roaming around the hall at ARM TechCon 2012 left me with eight things of note, but one of the larger ideas showing up everywhere is the Xilinx Zynq. Designers are enthralled with the idea of a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 closely coupled with programmable logic.… Read More
3D Architectures for Semiconductor Integration and Packaging
There is obviously a lot going on in 3D IC these days. And I don’t mean at the micro level of FinFETs which is also a way of going vertical. I mean through-silicon-via (TSV) based approaches for either stacking die or putting them on an interposer. Increasingly the question is no longer if this technology will be viable (there… Read More
An FPGA Design Flow with Aldec Tools
I’ve used FPGA vendor-supplied tools from both Xilinxand Lattice Semibefore, so I wanted to see what EDA tools Aldec has to offer for FPGA design. I read the Aldecwhite paper, Corporate Standardization of FPGA Design Flow, and summarize what I found.… Read More
Second FPGA to the right, and straight on ‘til it works
In a fantasy world where there were no coding errors or integration issues, FPGA designs would fly straight through synthesis easily and quickly. Maybe that world does exist somewhere. For the rest of us, who have experienced the agony of running a large FPGA design – again – only to find another error and have to start over, there … Read More
What I Learned About FPGA-based Prototyping
Today I attended an Aldec webinar about ASIC and SoC prototyping using the new HES-7 Board. This prototyping board is based on the latest Virtex-7 FPGA chips from Xilinx.
You can view the recorded webinar here, which takes about 30 minutes (should be available in a few days). I first blogged about the HES-7 two months ago, ASIC Prototyping… Read More
The logic of trusting FPGAs through DO-254
Any doubters of the importance of FPGA technology to the defense/aerospace industry should consider this: each Airbus A380 has over 1000 Microsemi FPGAs on board. That is a staggering figure, especially considering the FAA doesn’t trust FPGAs, or the code that goes into them.… Read More
Next Generation FPGA Prototyping
One technology that has quietly gone mainstream in semiconductor design is FPGA prototyping. That is, using an FPGA version of the design to run extensive verification. There are two approaches to doing this. The first way is simply to build an prototype board, buy some FPGAs from Xilinx or Altera and do everything yourself. The… Read More
Xilinx Programmable Packet Processor
At the Linley conference last week I ran into Gordon Brebner of Xilinx. He and I go a long way back. We had adjacent offices in Edinburgh University Computer Science Department back when we were doing our PhDs and conspiring to network the department’s Vax into the university network over a two-week vacation. We managed to … Read More
ASML- Soft revenues & Orders – But…China 49% – Memory Improving