Prototyping with the Latest and Greatest Xilinx FPGAs

Prototyping with the Latest and Greatest Xilinx FPGAs
by Daniel Nenni on 11-11-2020 at 6:00 am

Prototyping with the Latest and Greatest Xilinx FPGAs

I was reading the S2C press release announcing their new FPGA prototyping platform based on the Xilinx UltraScale+ VU19P FPGA, and how the new FPGA will accelerate billion gate FPGA prototyping, and I was struck by the stunning implications of this announcement.  Not that billion gate SoC designs can now be prototyped with FPGAs,… Read More


The Future of FPGAs

The Future of FPGAs
by Kris Kachris on 11-08-2020 at 10:00 am

The Future of FPGAs

On June 1, 2015 Intel and Altera announced , that they had entered into a definitive agreement under which Intel would acquire Altera for $16.7 billions. That was a major milestone for the FPGA community as Xilinx and Altera were the main FPGA vendors.

After the official announcement of AMD to acquire Xilinx, there is a huge… Read More


AMD and Intel Update with Xilinx

AMD and Intel Update with Xilinx
by Daniel Nenni on 11-06-2020 at 10:00 am

AMD Xilinx Acquisition

The AMD acquisition of Xilinx is certainly big news but as an insider looking at the media coverage I think there are a few more points to consider. While most of the coverage has been positive there will always be negatives and we can look at that as well.

Intel acquired Altera in 2015 for $16.7B at a 50% premium which was a major disruption… Read More


Reverse-engineering the First FPGA Chip Xilinx XC2064

Reverse-engineering the First FPGA Chip Xilinx XC2064
by Ken Shirriff on 09-16-2020 at 6:00 am

Xilinx XC2064

A Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) can implement arbitrary digital logic, anything from a microprocessor to a video generator or crypto miner. An FPGA consists of many logic blocks, each typically consisting of a flip flop and a logic function, along with a routing network that connects the logic blocks. What makes an FPGA… Read More


Xilinx Moves from Internal Flow to Commercial Flow for IP Integration

Xilinx Moves from Internal Flow to Commercial Flow for IP Integration
by Daniel Payne on 08-25-2020 at 10:00 am

Xilinx IP min

I’ll never forget first learning about Xilinx when they got started back in 1984, because the concept of a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) was so simple and elegant, it was rows and columns of logic gates that a designer could program to perform any logic function, then connect that logic to IO pads to drive other chips … Read More


The Largest Engineering Simulation Virtual Event in the World!

The Largest Engineering Simulation Virtual Event in the World!
by Daniel Nenni on 05-22-2020 at 10:00 am

ANSYS Simulation World

ANSYS is the world leader in engineering simulation across multiple markets. One of those markets just happens to be semiconductor which is why ANSYS is on SemiWiki.com. Due to the pandemic ANSYS has transformed their popular live regional events to one broad virtual event “Simulation World”.

“Simulation World is world’s largestRead More


Actel Goes Public – The IPO

Actel Goes Public – The IPO
by John East on 09-23-2019 at 6:00 am

In 1990 Xilinx notified us that they believed Actel was infringing a patent that had just been issued to them.  My immediate thoughts – the patent system is all screwed up!  Actel had been developing our product for five years. We had been shipping it for a year and a half.  During all that time, we were totally unaware that there was … Read More


More Actel Foundry Woes: Andy Grove and Intel

More Actel Foundry Woes: Andy Grove and Intel
by John East on 09-16-2019 at 6:00 am

The foundry problem continued to plague us at Actel.  We had a really complex process! But  —- we needed state of the art feature sizes if we were to compete with Xilinx.  TI and Matsushita had been doing a good job for us, but not in fabs with state of the art technology.  We were two process generations behind! At two generations… Read More


From AMD to Actel (to Microchip)

From AMD to Actel (to Microchip)
by John East on 09-02-2019 at 6:00 am

By the late 80s it had become clear to me that the Japanese were right.  Memories,  Microprocessors,  and Gate Arrays (As well as ASICs) were what customers wanted then.  “Building blocks of ever-increasing complexity” was obsolete.  What next?  Should I try to become an overnight networking expert?  Maybe a DSP expert?  Pretty… Read More


Tortuga Webinar: Ensuring System Level Security Through HW/SW Verification

Tortuga Webinar: Ensuring System Level Security Through HW/SW Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 08-08-2019 at 6:00 am

Jason Oberg

We all know (I hope) that security is important so we’re willing to invest time and money in this area but there are a couple of problems. First there’s no point in making your design secure if it’s not competitive and making it competitive is hard enough, so the great majority of resource and investment is going to go into that objective.… Read More