FROM
THE EDITOR
"…and what do you do for a living?" Those of us in high-tech professions always pause for just a moment to prepare. Who is this person asking the question? Do they have a technical background? Do they really want to know the answer? Will their eyes glaze over with disinterest right from the beginning, hang on until we hit an unfamiliar term like "semiconductor" and then fade away, or stick with us right to the end and follow up with "So, do you feel like Moore's Law will peter out after the 45nm process node?"
Our newest feature article examines how we describe our careers to the world. For most of us, the answer depends on the audience and on our own motivations.
Also this week, we have a technical paper from Michael Lundh of Stravus Engineering in Sweden. For those of us that live every day in the world of FPGAs, LUTs, VHDL- and Verilog-based design entry and simulation, logic synthesis, and layout, it is sometimes very interesting to step outside our zone of familiarity to see how FPGAs are perceived and programmed by engineers from a completely different domain. For some, FPGAs represent something akin to a new type of processor – one that follows a completely unfamiliar set of rules, and requires a completely alien set of programming conventions. This technical paper gives some fascinating insight into both the variety of perceptions of FPGAs in various engineering communities, and into novel methodologies for accelerating compute-intensive algorithms using FPGA technology.
Thanks for reading! If there's anything we can do to make our publications
more useful to you, please let us know at: comments@fpgajournal.com
Kevin Morris – Editor
FPGA and Structured ASIC Journal
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What Do You Tell Them?
Explaining a Complex Career
My twenty-three-year-old eyes couldn't muster the maturity to disguise my frustration. He sensed their weakness. It was what he was watching for. Even as I struggled in vain to regain my composure, he moved in for the kill. "What did you say again that your company does?" My father posed the question, fully aware of the answer, waiting with the patience of the hunter who has already cornered his prey for my inevitable self-destruction.
I rolled into my own defeat with the resignation of a mortally wounded rabbit. "Gate arrays," I replied, already knowing the next step of the dance. Then I made a futile attempt to divert him. "They're chips used to…"
"Oh yes, that's right, Gatorade." he interrupted, determined to repeat the entire game despite my desire to resign. "I used to give that to my marching band members so they wouldn't get dehydrated on hot days. Don't remember it coming in chip form, though – seems like it was liquid or powder."
[more]
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Field Programmable Gate Arrays for Flexible and Fast Data Processing
by Michael Lundh, Fredrik Lundell, Said Zahrai, and Daniel Söderberg
Abstract
Use of a generic FPGA board together with a powerful programming environment is investigated. It is demonstrated that high-performance real-time analysis is achieved at a reasonable cost. The system is simple to integrate with off-the-shelf acquisition systems such as LabVIEW. A flexible wavelet algorithm is programmed and is found to be considerably faster than the processor of the host computer. The flexibility of the processing unit makes it a promising tool for applications where ordinary desktop computers do not provide enough processing power.
Research-oriented experimental equipment must often offer high-performance computing capabilities and a high degree of flexibility simultaneously. To achieve that, the manufacturer of such devices often rely on specialized devices produced at relatively low volume and high cost. [more]
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