When you think of Xilinx the word FPGA is the first that comes to mind. But Xilinx has really moved beyond the sort of simple glue-logic arrays that their first success was built on. A modern array contains processors as well as programmable fabric, hence the Xilinx tag-line “all programmable”. But another area that… Read More
Tag: fpga
ARM TrustZone and Zynq
Security of embedded devices is becoming more and more important. The requirement for good protection increases as devices become more interconnected: wearable medical devices that connect to the cloud, mobile base stations that are no longer up poles but in much less physically secure areas, cars that communicate among themselves.… Read More
ARM ♥ Xilinx!
The good news is that as a part of SemiWiki we get free media passes to all of the cool conferences. The bad news is that our inboxes get flooded with announcements. ARM TechCon is next week and my delete button is on overtime but it is interesting to see who is active in conferences and who is not. In this case Xilinx is very active and Altera… Read More
Synopsys Verification Continuum
Verification spans a number of different technologies, from virtual platforms, RTL simulation, formal techniques, emulation and FPGA prototyping. Going back a few years, most of these technologies came from separate companies and one effect of this was that moving the design from one verification environment to another required… Read More
Transceiver Verification of a 20nm Altera FPGA Device
FPGA devices are a great way to drive silicon technology development because they contain both digital and analog IP, along with sophisticated IO cells. The highest performance IOs are transceivers, and Altera has recently designed the Arria 10 device family to include up to 96 transceivers, using a 20nm technology that can achieve… Read More
Develop High Performance Machine Vision in the Blink of an Eye
The growing capabilities of silicon along with improved algorithms means that machine vision is becoming increasingly important since more and more systems can be built in such areas as manufacturing, intelligent traffic management, bar code scanning, counterfeit detection and even sports simulation. Is that a 3X driver?… Read More
Xilinx: Revenue Down, Profit Up, FinFET on Schedule
Xilinx announced their results today and had their conference call this afternoon, which I listened to. For them this is 1Q fiscal 2015 which means you have to be careful since there is a big difference between talking about fiscal quarters and calendar quarters. Xilinx’s conference calls are interesting for a couple of … Read More
Rest in Peace CPUs, Hello FPGAs
FPGAs in many ways are still a bit mysterious to some folk. I was at a high level summit in April, and I realized that many there had no idea what an FPGA was. They knew at least what a CPU was or meant and that their kids talk about GPUs. A good analogy I have for an FPGA when compared to a CPU is something like this. Think of the FPGA and CPU as … Read More
Winds of Change in the Custom Chip Market
The most interesting part of the semiconductor market for me has always been the Custom Chip sector – the FPGA, ASIC and SoC companies where I have spent my entire career. These three segments provide an excellent barometer of the overall state of financial health and technological innovation for the entire High Tech industry, … Read More
Palladium’s Little Brother Protium
Today, Cadence announced Protium, a new FPGA prototyping platform for software development. During development of an SoC, the most appropriate methodology changes. In the early days, developing RTL, the primary tool is simulation. Then, as the blocks get bigger or as the whole chip starts to come together, typically simulation… Read More