Mentor Functional Verification Study 2016

Mentor Functional Verification Study 2016
by Bernard Murphy on 09-14-2016 at 7:00 am

Periodically, Mentor commissions a user/usage survey on Functional Verification, conducted by the Wilson Research Group, then they publish the results to all of us, an act of industry good-citizenship for which I think we owe them a round of thanks. Harry Foster at Mentor is breaking down the report into a series of 15 blogs. He’s… Read More


SoC FPGAs for IoT Edge Computing

SoC FPGAs for IoT Edge Computing
by Claudio Avi Chami on 09-11-2016 at 4:00 pm

One of the reasons for the explosive growth of IoT is that embedded devices with networking capabilities and sensor interfaces are cheap enough to deploy them at a plethora of locations.

However, network bandwidth is limited. Not only that, but also, the latency of the network can be of seconds or minutes. By the time the sensor data… Read More


FPGAs at Deep Machine Learning

FPGAs at Deep Machine Learning
by Claudio Avi Chami on 09-08-2016 at 12:00 pm

The concept of machine learning is not new. Attempts at systems emulating intelligent behavior, like expert systems, go as far back as the early 1980’s. And the very notion of modern Artificial Intelligence has a long history. The name itself was coined at a Dartmouth College conference (1956), but the idea of an “electronicRead More


Pseudo random generator tutorial in VHDL (Part 3/3)

Pseudo random generator tutorial in VHDL (Part 3/3)
by Claudio Avi Chami on 09-04-2016 at 4:00 pm



On the first two chapters of this Tutorial we started with a simple LFSR module and added a test bench. Then, on chapters three and four we upgraded our module with some features and learned to export the test bench data to files.
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Did My FPGA Just Fail?

Did My FPGA Just Fail?
by Daniel Payne on 08-22-2016 at 12:00 pm

Designing DRAMs at Intel back in the 1970s I first learned about Soft Errors and the curious effect of higher failure rates of DRAM chips in Denver, Colorado with a higher altitude than Aloha, OR. With the rapid growth of FPGA-based designs in 2016, we are still asking the same questions about the reliability of our chips used for safety-critical… Read More


Score 1 for IDMs vs Fabless Intel King of the Photonics Hill in Data Centers

Score 1 for IDMs vs Fabless Intel King of the Photonics Hill in Data Centers
by Mitch Heins on 08-18-2016 at 12:00 pm

For those of you waiting with baited breath to see the Fabless community with the likes of Broadcom or Qualcomm challenge Intel in the data center space, you were just dealt a significant blow. Intel debuted their long awaited silicon photonics modules for what they called “lightning-fast” connectivity in data centers. Intel … Read More


Xilinx is Killing Altera!

Xilinx is Killing Altera!
by Daniel Nenni on 06-28-2016 at 4:00 pm

At a recent outing with FPGA friends from days gone by, the long running Xilinx vs Altera debate has come to an end. The bottom line is that Xilinx has used the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) of the Intel acquisition quite effectively against Altera and is racking up 20nm and 16nm design wins at an alarming rate. It will be a while … Read More


Fast Track to a reconfigurable ASIC design

Fast Track to a reconfigurable ASIC design
by Don Dingee on 04-25-2016 at 4:00 pm

Licensing IP can be a pain, especially when the vendor’s business model has front-loaded costs to get started. Without an easy way to evaluate IP, justifying a purchase may be tough. With more mid-volume starts coming for the IoT, wearables, automotive, and other application segments, it’s a growing concern. Flex… Read More