Archives: Articles
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Wim Roelandts
Programmable logic is spreading like a prairie fire across the landscape of systems design. For the past two decades, Xilinx technology has been at the…
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Destination DSP
As FPGAs have earned greater acceptance as the platform of choice for high-performance digital signal processing (DSP), the design methodology gap between software DSP implementation…
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Living in the Product Development
Fiscal Focus The recent downturn in the semiconductor industry, unprecedented in its magnitude and duration, has forced application specific standard product (ASSP) vendors to improve…
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Customer-Specific FPGAs
Introduction The risks associated with ASIC solutions increase in magnitude with the move to smaller process geometries. This coupled with the increase in design complexity…
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Cost-Reduction Quagmire
Your design is working perfectly – on your development board. Unfortunately, your company is probably not planning to ship FPGA development boards as part of…
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Benchmarking Battlefield
In our previous article “Terminology Tango 101” we poked fun at the myriad metrics given by programmable logic companies in their publications and data sheets.…
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Overview of Memory Types and DDR Interface Design Implementation
Memory Overview Over the past several years the electronics market and, more specifically, the memory market has undergone significant change. Prior to the electronics industry…
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High DRAMa
A decade ago, memory was not mentioned in the same breath as programmable logic. Each component type had its own role in system design, and…
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Package Deal
Choosing an FPGA package is both simple and fun. We have flat-pack, via-stack, timing sometimes outa’ whack; BGA, pin-array, tin-whisker sneak attack, lead-free, QFP, 12-layer…
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Does Single-pass Physical Synthesis Work for FPGAs?
As mask prices and NRE costs rise to exorbitant levels, the ASIC route becomes increasingly unrealistic for many applications, especially in low- to medium-volume production…