This has been a heated topic since Intel announced that it would open its manufacturing facilities to the fabless ecosystem more than a year ago. I for one think it is a colossal mistake and I’m not surprised that many others share this view. IDM’s offering of excess manufacturing capacity to semiconductor design companies… Read More
As the largest FPGA vendor, Xilinx is on top of it’s social media game by using multiple channels to talk with customers and listen. Browsing their Home page I quickly found an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) icon just below the rotating banner images, plus a link to their Blog.… Read More
A couple of weeks ago, Xilinx and TSMC announced the production release of the Virtex-7 HT family, the industry’s first heterogeneous 3D ICs in production. With this milestone, all Xilinx 28nm 3D IC families are now in volume production. These 28nm devices were developed on TSMC’s Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS)… Read More
The 5[SUP]th[/SUP] annual TSMC OIP Forum was last week and thankfully there were no surprises with the exception of how many people asked me who I think will be the next TSMC CEO. Certainly I have no idea but I would be happy to use my incredible powers of deductive reasoning to determine who it will be.
The TSMC Open Innovation Platform®… Read More
Very rarely does the FPGA designer, especially with respect to RADAR, think of the FPGA as a floating point processor. Just to be sure I asked my 6 year old and she agreed. But you know what, the Xilinx FPGAs float. Go try it, order some up and fill up the tub.
Anyways I purpose a duel to the avid VHDL coder. I want you to design me a Sine(x) … Read More
Almost without exception these days, semiconductor products face strict power and thermal budgets. Of course there are many issues with dynamic power but one big area that has been getting increasingly problematic is static power. For various technical reasons we can no longer reduce the voltage as much as we would like from one… Read More
Silicon dominates our lives, CPU’s, GPU’s are in the limelight but the unsung hero is the FPGA. They simply do the work where other silicon dare not tread, as they are unfit for the task. Never send a boy to do a man’s job.
For a moment, if we can, just for a few minutes perhaps we can break away from the social media bubble… Read More
I have many thoughts on this topic, so forgive the word salad that may ensue. I have been thinking about Coca-Cola lately, partly because I bought an old coke machine (I’m one of those guys… pray for my wife). I am amazed that Coke which was founded in 1886, still has a secret recipe. I like that, but boy every time the web reveals the coke… Read More
Just as important as block RAMs, IO and DSP48’s is what interconnect or fabric is going to be used when considering SoC FPGA designs. I think Xilinx has found the winning combination. What is paramount to the new SoC FPGA methodologies is not only the challenge of moving huge amounts of data around; we are now to consider data… Read More
I never understood when I was a kid how ‘the Blob’ could actually catch someone but it sure did. It caught the unsuspecting, the off guard. I mean you’d have time for a soda and shower if you saw it on your road. And no, your manager is not the Blob; don’t think like that, it’s always his boss. The blob comes to consume the worker who was unaware… Read More
