Archives: Articles
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Fast. Very, Very Fast.
How fast? Try 1.5 GHz. Now, I know what you’re thinking… “offer void where prohibited, professional stunt engineer on closed-course benchmark – do not attempt,…
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Non-Volatile Memory’s Continued Mission Creep
It’s no surprise that non-volatile RAM has been making a play to upstage hard disks. The promise of SSDs comes ever closer to being realized.…
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Play It Again, Sam
No one wants to sit around waiting for software to run. Whether it’s simulation, FPGA fitting, timing analysis, or place-and-route (PnR), run time is the…
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Comparing Low-Cost SERDES-Based FPGAs to ASSPs for PCI Express System Design
The applications space for the PCI Express standard continues to expand tremendously as it becomes more commonplace in PCs and other systems where inexpensive, high-speed…
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Sun Shines on Xilinx
Today’s high-performance, multi-core processing systems are complicated beasts – from both a hardware and a software perspective. Developing the architectures, protocols, interconnects, and software development…
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Software Sells Processors
Ounce for ounce, silicon chips are more valuable than gold. A tiny fleck of Intel Core 2 Duo processor silicon sells for hundreds of dollars…
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Loss of Innocence
Innocence is ignorance. And ignorance is bliss. The messy, inconvenient details and realities of the world can be an incredible buzzkill, and it’s just nicer…
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Apples to Apples
We’ve all had a fun time complaining. It’s not like Marketing (upper-case “M”) was without blame, either. When the new millennium dawned, we’d had enough…
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The March of IDEs
Debugging is not popularly viewed as an opportunity for personal growth and enlightenment. Surveys show that embedded programmers hate debugging more than any other task.…