When the news broke about the on, off, and on-again Intel-Altera merger a few weeks ago, I checked off another box on my Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon scorecard. That plus a $5 bill gets me a Happy Meal at McDonalds, but in a post-Altera world, it might be worth more.
On January 16, 2008, I’m sitting in a meeting with some Intel strategic marketing… Read More
High level synthesis (HLS) seems to have been part of the backdrop of design automation for so long that it seems to be one of those things that nobody notices any more. But it has also crept up on people and gone from interesting technology to keep an eye on to getting genuine adoption. The first commercial product in the space was behavioral… Read More
Intel’s 10nm may be reliving the 14nm elongated delay issue-
Schedules & tool delivery may be pushed even deeper into 2016-
Meanwhile Samsung & TSMC press on-
Could Intel be embarrassed?
… Read More
A few months ago, when the Xilinx UltraScale VU440 FPGA began shipping, one of the immediate claims was a quad-FPGA-based prototyping board touted as “Godzilla’s Butcher on Steroids”. That was a refreshing and creative PR approach, frankly. I’m always careful with less creative terms like “world’s biggest” or “world’s fastest”,… Read More
Does the evil sounding phenomenon known as Dark Silicon create a big opportunity for FPGA vendors as was predicted recently by Pacific Crest Securities? John Vinh posits that using multiple cores as a method of scaling throughput is flattening out, and the use of FPGA’s to perform computation can help off-load and thus overcome… Read More
It’s very common these days to hear about a billion gates SoC, but not without a huge design and verification effort and investment of resources. A complete verification of such an SoC needs several verification steps including software and hardware based methodologies that often are not sufficient to cover the whole SoC. In order… Read More
Xilinx users will welcome the brand-new release of Vivado Design Suite 2015.1. For openers, device support for the latest FPGAs in the UltraScale family – XCVU440, XCVU190, and XCVU125 – has been added in the release, and early access code for the XCVU160 is available from a local Xilinx FAE. Installation has been streamlined, … Read More
The NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show has just started, April 11-16th in Las Vegas. It covers a very broad range of topics:
As the premier trade association for broadcasters, NAB advances the interests of our members in federal government, industry and public affairs; improves the quality and profitability of … Read More
You may already have heard today’s big news in the semiconductor fabless ecosystem that Intel is apparently in talks to buy Altera. I embarrassed myself predicting that Samsung were in talks to buy Freescale (which, of course, they might have been but NXP won that particular race). But this time it is definite enough that … Read More
In the modern SoC era, verification is no longer a post-design activity. The verification strategy must be planned much earlier in the design cycle; otherwise the verification closure can become a never ending problem. Moreover, verification which appears to be complete may actually be incomplete because of undetected issues… Read More
