FROM
THE EDITOR
This week, we at FPGA Journal decided it was time to stand up and speak out for our favorite technology. It’s time for FPGAs to move into a different league. We’ve had ten briefings in two weeks, and each time the company doing the briefing was demonstrating a board with FPGAs performing a completely different “specialized” task. Technologies with that kind of versatility are few and far-between. In fact, we’ve seen this kind of flexibility only twice in our engineering lives. It’s time for FPGAs to join the ranks of Duct Tape and WD-40. This week’s verbiage has the details.
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Kevin Morris – Editor
FPGA and Structured ASIC Journal
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Duct Tape, WD-40, FPGAs
The Universal Survival Kit
The race car flies into the pits just below the maximum speed – its automatic governor making sure that the team isn’t assessed a penalty. Exhaust gases vent at 1500 degrees fahrenheit as throttle valves close. Over a million dollars worth of high-performance technology glides down the tarmac to the designated pit. The crew is already engaged: tires are off and replacement rubber is being mounted, fuel is gushing into the tank through a high-volume filler connection, and the pit chief runs out with the critical component to keep the team in the race – a four inch strip of duct tape.
It doesn’t really matter what he was using the tape for this time. He’s used it so many times for so many different purposes that the crew wouldn’t consider starting a race without several rolls of it at the ready. Duct Tape is truly a universal remedy – and can be pressed into service in such a wide variety of situations it would be absurd to even try to bound it by cataloging them. As indispensable as it is in racing (where they refer to it as “200 MPH tape”), it is used in an enormous number of applications like gaffing, radome repair on the nose cone of fighter planes, canoe repair, wardrobe enhancement -- the list is almost endless.
As impressive as Duct Tape is, its universal applicability is easily rivaled by WD-40, the almost magical combination of dry-cleaning solvent, mineral oil, and some other miscellaneous ingredients that serve as a cleaner, lubricant, rust inhibitor, and a moisture removal agent for things like electrical components. My Dad regularly attempted to extend the use of WD-40 for even more radical uses (don’t try this at home), such as – insecticide, but I was never quite convinced of its efficacy in such “out of the box” applications. [more]
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