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
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
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
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
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
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
