CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES

Surveillance Silicon
Stretch Spans the Software Gap
Design Tool Evolution
by Rob Irwin, Altium Limited
Flash Flood
Inside FPGAs' Non-volatile Companions
Cheap Chip-keeping
Actel’s $1.20 System Management Solution
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

JOURNAL WEBCASTS

Surveillance Silicon
Stretch Spans the Software Gap

These days, a number of companies are ferociously burning venture capital in order to develop new programmable architectures that offer a better tradeoff in the performance/power/cost space than existing devices such as traditional von Neumann processors or FPGAs.  Typically, these architectures attempt to parallelize the processing problem with cleverly connected redundant hardware.  In order to obtain their venture capital, these companies produce sophisticated and complex PowerPoint propaganda describing in detail (or so it seems) how their path to parallelism outperforms existing architectures by factors ranging from two to two thousand. 

Savvy venture capitalists perform their due diligence, bringing in digital design divas of their own to review the radical claims of the would-be fundees.  Often, these claims triumph in the test of the third-party expert with convincing theoretical wins against the status quo.  Generally, however, the focus is on the hardware architecture itself.  When it comes to the question of “How do you program it?”, the PowerPoint prognostications become somewhat pixilated.  This question, however, is the Achilles’ heel of the parallel processing revolution. [more]

Design Tool Evolution
by Rob Irwin, Altium Limited

It’s no accident that PCB design was one of the first electronics design tasks to which computer technology was applied in an effort to automate the process. The EDA industry really had its roots in the need to handle the explosion in circuit complexity brought about by the advent of digital electronics and, in particular, the rise of the microprocessor in electronics design. Traditional manual design techniques became too cumbersome to manage when faced with the onslaught of higher pin counts, multi-line signal buses and growing numbers of board layers.

Today it’s unthinkable that any modern electronic design would be done without the use of computer-based tools to automate many of the processes across all the design disciplines. However, design automation is not a simple matter of feeding data to a software algorithm. It must tread a fine line between assisting the designer to get a task done more quickly and efficiently without hindering the desired outcome by assuming too much control. [more]