Archives: Articles
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The End of Silicon Valley
A moment of silence, please, for Silicon Valley. Intel announced last week it would close its chip-manufacturing plant located near the company’s headquarters in Santa…
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Buy a Processor; Get an Operating System
Everybody’s making deals these days. Fast-food joints have “value menus.” Hotels are offering two-for-one deals; ailing Internet retailers will cover the cost of shipping; desperate…
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Breakout
It was crunch time – the end of the semester in EE school – early 1980s. I, in my usual undergraduate fashion, had procrastinated and…
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Open, Virtual and a Platform
Let’s start with some thundering generalisations. It is taking too long to bring SoCs to the market. A big bottleneck, and a large and growing…
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Sun Starts to Flame Out
Cue the obligatory wordplay about sunsets, falling stars, or fading sunlight. Sun Microsystems, the former darling of Silicon Valley, is dwindling fast. And I must…
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HDL is Dead
The mid-term exam was straightforward. We were given five specifications, and we had to write a program for each. Each program would be worth 20…
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Hijacking the Hijacker
Parasites are generally not perceived as a good thing. They benefit at the expense of something else. There’s none of the quid pro quo associated…
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Coverity Enforces Software Architecture
There’s a school of thought that says that you should write your comments first and the code afterwards and that source code should be treated…
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The Making of FPGA Journal
9AM Wednesday morning: ——– Kevin, My client, ArrayMaster, is announcing a new member of their popular FPGA family aimed specifically at developers of…
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Guarding Against Interlopers
As you approach the entrance, you know you’re in the right place. You almost feel it before you hear it. A few more steps and…