CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES

I/O-topia
The Outer Ring of FPGA Architecture
FPOAs Meet the Challenges of H.264 Encoding of High Definition Video
by Tom Diamond, MathStar, Inc.
FP?A
The Quest for the Best Building Blocks
NOS FPGA
Vintage Silicon Revisited
COTS Supercomputing
DRC Harnesses FPGAs
FPGAs and Ethernet
Providing Programmability to Pervasive Interconnect Standard, by Navneet Rao, Xilinx, Inc.
Duct Tape, WD-40, FPGAs
The Universal Survival Kit
Space FPGAs Get a Boost
Actel Announces Improvements

JOURNAL WEBCASTS

I/O-topia
The Outer Ring of FPGA Architecture

Last week we examined the legacy of the LUT – the basic building block that defines the very fabric of FPGAs.  Surprisingly, however, the primary driver of attributes such as cost, power consumption, and utility in FPGAs is not the fabric itself, but the choice of I/O for the device.  You see, while the internal logic keeps shrinking, some of the I/O structures don’t really scale well – things like bonding pads and higher-current transistors don’t track Moore’s Law, so the cost of an individual I/O compared with an amount of core logic keeps increasing with every product generation. [more]

FPOAs Meet the Challenges of H.264 Encoding of High Definition Video
by Tom Diamond, MathStar, Inc.

Insatiable demand for high definition video and rapidly proliferating video production and distribution methods are driving the need for advanced video encoding and compression schemes. Several international standards and forums have been established in recent years to deal with various aspects of digital video encoding. The MPEG-4 Part10/H.264 encoding standard is useful in a wide range of professional video applications including broadcast head-end, IPTV, multi-stream encoding/decoding, and image processing, among others. [more]