FROM
THE EDITOR
This week, Xilinx hits us with a duo of announcements – first, a new family from the Virtex-5 generation “Virtex-5 FXT,” and second, a new release of the company’s ISE software tool suite. Our latest feature article examines the new offerings.
Next, we celebrate the season with the announcement of a unique new technology from none other than our own Bryon Moyer. Bryon’s new patent-pending solution promises to help you snag the technical information you need without falling victim to the perils of marketing run amok. Our patent application is submitted for your approval.
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 in Chief
Techfocus Media, Inc.
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EVENTS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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Tools and Transceivers
Dual Xilinx Announcements
(Kevin Morris)
In the old days, we had only two kinds of FPGA – small and smaller, also known as slow and slower, or hot and hotter... The technology was useful for a few high-value applications, but it was limited on all three fronts – density (cost), speed, and power -- from attacking a much broader market. As we waltzed along the to the three-count meter of Moore’s Law, all three critical parameters improved. Density went up, frequency got faster, power cooled down, and people got happier.
After a few rounds, however, FPGAs had pretty well saturated the bigger, faster, cooler crowd. In order to reach a broader audience now, we needed to teach our favorite semiconductors some new tricks. For the DSP people, we designed hardened high-speed multipliers. For connectivity hogs, we grafted on multi-gigabit serial transceivers. For embedded designers, we dropped in a processor core or two – and all of those people needed big blocks of memory to make effective use of the new features.
The addition of all those features, however, gave us the FPGA that was something akin to a semiconductor Swiss Army Knife. It had the features required to do just about any job you could name. Unfortunately, almost no project required all the features, so you ended up buying (and powering) a bunch of extra features that you didn’t need. Ever use the toothpick feature on your pocketknife? Nope. Me neither. [more]
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Methods for Reducing Marketing Jitter Through Filtering of Marketing Noise in Conference Presentations
(Bryon Moyer)
Related Applications
None
Field of the Invention
Way out in left field.
Background of the Invention
For purposes of gathering together for reasons including but not limited to sharing information, making commercial announcements, receiving training, professional networking, escaping a nagging spouse or children, and racking up frequent flier miles, it is common for engineering professionals to attend conferences or conventions. Such conferences may consist of convention-center catered meals, speeches in which very important people say what everyone already knows, an exhibit hall wherein more women are employed than in the remaining entirety of the technology industry, and various panels and presentations intended to provide information from presenter to audience.
For most such conferences, the tone of the panels and presentations may be expected to be professional and technical, with minimal intrusion by commercial considerations. In the course of assembling such panels and inviting speakers to prepare presentations, it may occur that the technical information being communicated experiences high levels of marketing noise injection. This creates reluctance by engineers to attend such highly noisy presentations, a phenomenon referred to as marketing jitter. [more]
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