Archives: Articles
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Actel Adds Analog
Myopia is one of the few unfortunate consequences of specialization. While focus, refinement, and evolution deliver us some of our most impressive efficiencies, indiscriminate rule…
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A New Spin on FPGA Re-spins
Back when FPGAs were simpler devices, in-system debug was sufficient. Turning a re-spin in response to a specification violation found on the bench was a…
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SRC Code
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of hardware design, it was the age of programming,…
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LSI Logic’s Leverage
What has over two million real ASIC gates, runs at over 200MHz with twenty levels of logic, burns about the power of a cell-based ASIC,…
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Ditchin’ DAC
From before my kids were born until after they were grown and graduated, it was a June ritual. Twenty-one times in all, I made my…
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What the Hell is ESL?
The tool category known as “Kitchen Appliances” covers a wide gamut of capabilities. Kitchen appliances range from general-purpose, universally useful tools such as heat sources,…
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FPGAs Enabling Consumer Electronics – A Growing Trend
It was in the late 1990s that FPGA vendors first started exploring the low-cost, high-volume consumer market – a market that generally was ceded to…
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Are These Guys Dense, or What?
Context can drastically impact the meaning of a simple word. If you’re walking down the street minding your own business, you might find yourself feeling…
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Accelerating C Software Applications Using a CompactFlash FPGA Accelerator Card
As the cost per gate of FPGAs continues to plummet, developers of embedded software applications are being presented with increased opportunities to create high performance,…
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Shrink-wrapping EDA
When I bought my first 10MB hard-disk drive, the salesman came to visit and even took me out to lunch. I was a freshman in…