I remember meeting Ken McElvain at Silicon Compilers for the first time back in the 1980’s, he was a gifted EDA tool developer that did a lot of coding including logic synthesis, a cycle-based simulator and ATPG. Mentor Graphics acquired Silicon Compilers with Ken included, and he continued to create another logic synthesis… Read More
I haven’t sat down to speak with S2C since we collaborated on the book, PROTOTYPICAL, published just before DAC 2016 and even then, I hadn’t spoken to Toshio Nakama, their CEO. Toshio splits his time between the San Jose headquarters and the Shanghai headquarters so getting time to meet face-to-face has been challenging. I was finally… Read More
This interview originally appeared as the foreword to our book “Prototypical: The Emergence of FPGA-based Prototyping for SoC Design” but I thought it would be worth publishing for those of you who have not downloaded it yet. I also wanted to mention that our friends at S2C are currently offering a 50% discount on the… Read More
I write this article in reaction to another article from Seeking Alpha titled “Intel Next Big Thing”. I have extracted this from the article:
The IoT space is growing rapidly with the advent of connected cars, smart homes and a variety of connected devices and appliances. However, before a full-blown ecosystem around these devices… Read More
An incredibly pervasive trend at last year’s ARM TechCon was the IoT, and I expect this year to bring even more of the same, but with a twist. Where last year was mostly focused on ultra-low power edge devices and the mbed ecosystem, this year is likely to show a better balance of ideas across all three IoT tiers. I also expect a slew of … Read More
This is the second in series of interviews we will do with executives inside the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. Geoff Tate was the founding CEO of Rambus and is now CEO and co-founder of Flex Logix (embedded FPGA). This one should be of great interest due to the recent $16.7B acquisition of Altera by Intel. We all now know the importance… Read More
When we think of datacenters, we think of serried ranks of high-performance servers. Recent announcements from Google (on the Tensor Processing Unit), Facebook and others have opened our eyes to the role that specialized hardware and/or GPUs can play in support of deep/machine learning and big data analytics. But most of us would… Read More
Audi announced its piloted driving technology at CES 2015. The Audi Prologue includes the Advanced Driver Assistance System Platform (zFAS), co-developed with TTTech. The zFAS board is based on four devices: an Nvidia k1 processor and Infineon Aurix processor, Mobileye’s EyeQ3 for vision processing, and an Altera Cyclone … Read More
All the hubbub about FPGA-accelerated servers prompts a big question about cache coherency. Performance gains from external acceleration hardware can be wiped out if the system CPU cluster is frequently taking hits from cache misses after data is worked on by an accelerator.
ARM’s latest third-generation CoreLink CMN-600 … Read More
These days, FPGAs are fairly complex pieces of silicon. Being that the case, it would take several articles even to put a summary of the features embedded in high-end FPGA devices. Hence, in this article, I will concentrate in just one feature, namely, the new embedded memory blocks of the recently released Intel-Altera Stratix… Read More
