Archives: Articles
-
Lattice Strikes Back
When Xilinx and Altera made their recent announcements of new low-cost, SerDes-havin’ FPGA families, we pointed out that Lattice Semiconductor had started this pie-fight a…
-
Standardising on Analogue
Have you ever wanted to spend vast amounts of time in a conference room, real or virtual, arguing about the precise meanings of words? Trying…
-
Software Archeology
They’d been digging for only a couple weeks, with laborious care to make sure they didn’t inadvertently destroy that which had lain in quiet repose…
-
Mind the Gap
Printed circuit board (PCB) design software is one of the oldest segments of electronic design automation (EDA). Long before people were doing synthesis, formal verification,…
-
Maximizing Flash Lifetimes
Flash memory is cool to keep around because it’s non-volatile, it’s small, it’s convenient, and, dressed up in all manner of stickwear, well, who can…
-
Cleaning Up the Garbage
Angie was a project manager, and she managed a lot of projects. These were fast-moving jobs that required a lot of attention to make sure…
-
Serial Soirée
The age of mainstream 40nm FPGAs has now arrived. Last May, Altera announced the first-ever 40nm FPGA family – Stratix IV. Last quarter, that…
-
The Road Ahead
Each year the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) does an update. In case you haven’t seen it, it’s a comprehensive review of where the…
-
Freescale Bets on “Net-Book” Processor Chip
Just in time for the post-holiday buying season, Freescale has announced its newest embedded microprocessor, the i.MX51. Like other chips in the company’s MX line,…
-
Grand Unification Theory
It’s all coming together. In response to a rapidly broadening market and increasingly niched and specialized competition, the world’s largest FPGA company has narrowed and…