It’s near-impossible to read anything today about electronic design for cars without running into the ISO 26262 standard. If you design airborne electronic hardware, you’re likely very familiar with the DO-254 standard. But what do you do if you want to design a product to serve both markets? It looks like aircraft makers are increasingly… Read More
The lofty rise of the lowly FPGA
FPGA programmable logic has served in many capacities since it was introduced back in the early 80’s. Recently, with designers looking for innovative ways to boost system performance, FPGA’s have moved front and center. This initiative has taken on new urgency with the slowing down of process node based performance gains. The… Read More
"The Year of the eFPGA" 2017 Recap
This past January, I had postulated that 2017 would be the “Year of the Embedded FPGA”, as a compelling IP offering for many SoC designs (link). As the year draws to a close, I thought it would be interesting to see how that prediction turned out.
The criteria that would be appropriate metrics include: increasing capital investment;… Read More
Aldec and High-Performance Computing
Aldec continues to claim a bigger seat at the table, most recently in their attendance at SC17, the supercomputing conference hosted last month in Denver. I’m really not sure how to categorize Aldec now. EDA company seems to miss the mark by a wide margin. Prototyping company? Perhaps, though they have a much stronger focus on end-applications… Read More
When Invaluable Kills Business
Productivity is notoriously hard to sell. I recently visited a company where the engineering team wanted to evaluate one of our FPGA debug and analysis products on an existing board. This board had an FPGA that we supported and had all the required connectivity – it could just be used ‘out of the box’. Our tool – Exostiv… Read More
What are you ready to mobilize for FPGA debug?
There are 3 common misconceptions about debugging FPGA with the real hardware:
[LIST=1]
Scale the tools not your expectations
The complexity of silicon chips is exploding. Actually, it has been growing at a tremendous speed for decades. So far, the semiconductor industry has been successful at providing new ways to master new levels of complexity, over and over again.
Standardizing hardware platforms, using higher-level languages with a knowledge… Read More
DesignShare is all About Enabling Design Wins!
One of the barriers to silicon success has always been design costs, especially if you are an emerging company or targeting an emerging market such as IoT. Today design start costs are dominated by IP which is paid at the start of the project and that is after costly IP evaluations and other IP verification and integration challenges.… Read More
The perfect pairing of SOCs and embedded FPGA IP
In life, there are some things that just go together. Imagine the world without peanut butter and jelly, eggs and potatoes, telephones and voicemail, or the internet and search engines. In the world of computing there are many such examples – UARTS and FIFO’s, processor cores and GPU’s, etc. Another trait all these things have is… Read More
Timing Analysis for Embedded FPGA’s
The initial project planning for an SoC design project faces a difficult engineering decision with regards to the “margin” that should be included as part of timing closure. For cell-based blocks, the delay calculation algorithms within the static timing analysis (STA) flow utilize various assumptions to replace… Read More


Comparing Advanced Packaging from TSMC, Intel Foundry, and Samsung Foundry