One of the recurring themes I see here in the pages of SemiWiki and elsewhere is this pitched, bordering on religious battle between Altera and Xilinx. Just because both are FPGA technologies, the tendency is to put them in the same bucket, drawing direct comparisons between them. Some folks say there is no comparison; Xilinx has… Read More
I heard a rumor at lunchtime that Tabula was closing its doors. A friend of mine talked to a couple of employees and it is true. They have to be given 2 months notice apparently so the doors don’t actually close until March 24th. I thought they had raised $150M but Wikipedia (not always reliable of course) says $215M. They were … Read More
Xilinx announced their quarterly results last week. They slightly missed their number due mainly to a decline in wireless sales. Of course Xilinx parts don’t go in the smartphones since the cost and power are too high, but they are very heavily used in basestation, backhaul etc especially in China. Xilinx’s business… Read More
Xilinx has delivered not only “the biggest FPGA on the planet”, but what it claims is currently the world’s largest integrated circuit: the Virtex UltraScale VU440, with 19 billion transistors fabbed in TSMC 20nm. The list of first customers to receive parts says a lot about the state of SoC design today, and the vital role FPGA-based… Read More
It is not entirely clear what Xilinx is these days. Of course it is an FPGA company. If you hear the word FPGA then I bet Xilinx is the first thing you think of. But what Xilinx ships these days is a far cry from the type of device it created when it was starting, where FPGAs were largely used to vacuum up all the glue logic around the processors… Read More
I hope your Christmas break is starting off well! You know this, but evil takes no break for Christmas. We are seeing more and more the hacking of systems and it seems to have become the norm. Do you get nervous anymore when you hear that your credit card company lost their data? Or I mean your data?
It’s as if we have given up on the ideas … Read More
The maiden voyage of NASA’s Orion spacecraft brought a raft of articles about how the flight computer inside is “no smarter than your phone,” running on wheezing IBM PowerPC 750FX processors. NASA’s deputy manager for Orion avionics, Matt Lemke, admits the configuration is already obsolete – at least in commercial terms. … Read More
Ok, first thing first, Happy Thanksgiving! For the Miller’s as I get older, it is new traditions as some old ones have passed on. Memories are great and new ones to make. So you know the great debate right?
These poor people working Thanksgiving to sell some tablet or smart phone to save a few bucks. Those that must work, my condolences… Read More
For about a decade I am looking forward to seeing more of system level design and verification including high level synthesis (HLS), virtual prototyping, and system modeling etc. to come in the main stream of SoC design. Although the progress has been slow, I see it accelerating as more and more tools address the typical pain points… Read More
Xilinx announced their quarterly results a couple of days ago. Technically it is their Q2 2015. Sales were $604M and profitability was significantly higher than expected at $0.62/share. But that is not the most interesting thing about these calls. There is the Xilinx vs Altera story. And then there are tealeaves to be read about… Read More
