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FEATURE ARTICLES
Stigmata
Does your business card still say ASIC Designer?
Databahn
High-speed serial I/O for programmable logic
Going
Serial with your Backplane
by Jock Tomlinson, Lattice Semiconductor
Design-in
Kits Simplify Serial PCB
by Brad Griffin, Cadence Design Systems
Patently Unobvious
How the patent system works for and against technology
Embedded
Dilemma
Platforms, soft-cores, RTOS, oh my!
Bringing
the Processor into the FPGA
by Rob Irwin, Altium Limited
Language
Barrier
How will the next generation of FPGAs be designed?
What's
the Right Language for DSP System-Level Design?
by Tom Feist, VP of Marketing, AccelChip, Inc.
Board
with FPGAs
Challenges getting your FPGA to work - on your board
Stigmata
- Does your business card still say ASIC Designer?
In
even the driest, most highly technical areas, there is culture.
The culture of engineering communities is elusive because engineers
as a group tend to be highly intelligent, often introverted personalities.
Nonetheless, a culture (defined as the predominating attitudes and
behavior that characterize the functioning of a group) does exist.
In this culture, as in most, human traits such as ego and vanity
play major roles.
I was
at a technical conference listening to a paper on high-level design
methodologies with FPGA. The engineer seated next to me worked for
a global systems company. He leaned over and asked me several questions
about the paper. The presentation was in English, which was not
the native language of either the speaker or my neighbor. We exchanged
business cards, and I noticed that his said “ASIC designer”.
I had heard more than a year earlier that his company had a “no
more ASIC” policy. Because of rising NRE and risks, new design
starts were being diverted to FPGA. When I asked about this, the
young engineer immediately went on the defensive: “I am still
ASIC designer, just this year we are doing FPGAs instead.”
This
attitude, it turns out, is pervasive among engineers. ASIC design
has long been the prestigious assignment, and any change in that
perception is lagging the shift in technology. Creating a system-on-chip
design with one of today’s leading-edge FPGA technologies
is a challenging and daunting task. Using the technology, tools,
and techniques available to FPGA designers, a talented team can
have a single-chip solution with an embedded 32-bit processor, software,
peripherals, RTOS, and high-speed I/O up and running on a prototype
board in matter of a few weeks. Engineering-wise, this same task
would take the average ASIC design team months, possibly years,
to accomplish.
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