FROM
THE EDITOR
This week, we offer a brief tribute to one of our own – Shirley Rice, our copy editor turns 70 today. In our newest feature, we take a look at the real reason FPGA Journal has some of the best-edited articles in high-tech publishing. (Hint: it isn’t me.)
Next, we have a contributed article from Rich Howell of Actel. Rich takes a look at the unglamorous problem of system management. Today, the system management needs of the average design are becoming increasingly complex. This article may help get a few more hands in the air next time your company takes volunteers for this traditionally thankless task.
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. If you'd rather sound off in public, please post your comments or questions in our new Journal Forums.
Kevin Morris – Editor
FPGA and Structured ASIC Journal
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EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGY JOURNAL
A weekly e-mail newsletter from techfocus media (publishers of FPGA and Structured ASIC Journal) dedicated to the design and application of embedded systems and software.
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A Techfocus Tribute
From our JOURNAL Family's Journal
“FPGA’s at this price point offer an unprecedented value, and are an excellent strategy to future-proof your design with.”
Shirley stares at the sentence glowing from her Dell monitor for a minute and sighs, then she stretches as she looks out her office window at the distant San Antonio skyline. The publication deadline is rapidly approaching and the article needs serious work. There is too much wrong with this one sentence to even mention – dangling preposition, comma separating dependent clauses in a compound predicate, possessive form of “FPGA” instead of the plural…
Plus, she thinks, the whole thing doesn’t even make sense. Low-cost FPGAs are no longer a new idea. If FPGA Journal’s copy editor knows that, someone writing a feature article certainly should have a clue by now as well. Have they been living in a technology-proof cave for the past five years?
Shirley Rice, copy editor for FPGA Journal and Embedded Technology Journal celebrates her 70th birthday today. She doesn’t have an EE degree. In fact, she doesn’t have any formal electronics training at all. However, she has read each and every FPGA Journal article ever published – most of them several times. If you combine that learning with a Master’s degree in mathematics and some amazing analytical skills, you can see that she’d be a formidable foe in any debate with a roomful of practicing engineers. [more]
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System Management – Not Sexy, But Critical
by Rich Howell,
Actel Corporation
Your boss begins to drone on about the system maintenance check list items during your weekly meeting. Power initialization and sequencing, reset management, voltage and current monitoring, system clocking, data logging, remote communications, diagnostics and prognostics, SRAM field-programmable gate array (FPGA) management, errors and alarms, thermal management, ID and authentication, and microcontroller (MCU) boot loading. Just before you nod off in perfect sleep, you hear the words “critical,” “operational” and “job in jeopardy”…
The above is a collection of seemingly unrelated tasks with the goal of ensuring the proper operation of the system. All part of system management, these tasks focus on maximizing system uptime, identifying and communicating alert conditions, and logging data and alarm conditions. Sexy? No. Critical? Yes. [more]
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