Feature Articles
Socially Inept
Do Engineers Fail at Virtual Connections?
It's 4:45AM. Charles hits "snooze" one last time on his alarm clock. He can wait another 8 minutes before trying to really wake up for his 5AM conference call with Europe. His status report is 80% finished on his laptop, which waits in "hibernate" by his bed. His smartphone is on his nightstand, next to his bluetooth headset. He tells himself he's pretty much ready for the meeting.
4:53AM - the alarm beeps again and Charles forces his eyelids apart, rolls out of bed and stumbles down the hallway to the kitchen. The espresso machine is already warmed up. He drops in a coffee pod, places a cup below the spout, and presses the "Lungo" button. He wants the extra kick to keep him awake through his call. The 60-second espresso pull feels like an eternity and he bats his eyes into focus as the dark brown liquid slowly lightens. Finally, the machine clicks to a stop and he trundles back down the hall toward his bed, cuddling the warm mug with both hands. Read More
Debug Doppelgänger
InPA Aims to Simplify FPGA-based Prototypes
FPGA-based prototyping is probably the most popular and effective method for debugging and verifying complex designs at a reasonable speed. FPGAs can emulate your hardware design - usually at very near actual operating frequencies. As a result, you can run tests that you could not even contemplate with methods like simulation - including gathering real-wold stimulus from sensors, cameras, or other high-bandwidth hardware.
None of this is new. Unfortunately, another thing that isn’t new is that, despite a decade or two of refinement, FPGA-based prototypes are still unbelievably difficult and complex to get working in the first place, and they can be exceedingly tricky to use and understand properly. Starting with a nice, clean, HDL-based design that seems to work well (albeit slowly) in your favorite simulator, one might expect it to be a semi-trivial matter to get that same design up and running on that nice new FPGA prototyping board (or box) that you bought (or built).
Wrong-O
Why Are There No Successful New FPGA Companies?
FPGAs are wonderful things – but you know that; otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this. This year it will be 25 years since Xilinx shipped its first product, the XC2064, creating the name Field Programmable Gate Array to distinguish the device from other programmable logic and to rank it alongside the gate array in use for building ASICs.
By 1990, there were around 20 companies attempting to play in this market, but already Xilinx and Altera were pulling ahead, with Lattice, Actel, Atmel, and QuickLogic snapping at their heels. Today, twenty years later, Xilinx and Altera between them dominate the market, QuickLogic is in the programmable devices field but distances itself from the FPGA arena, and Atmel appears to be using FPGA fabric only with its AVR processor family. Actel and Lattice have a fraction of the market of Altera and Xilinx (although dominating some niche markets, like Actel in Rad-Hard). Oh, and there are some start-ups, such as Silicon Blue, Achronix, and Tabula hovering in the wings.
There is an I After All
But Seriously, Folks, It was a Team Effort
The disguise artist finishes the last touches on his makeup as the demolition expert prepares the detonators and charges. The electronics geek sits in front of a large wall of CRT monitors watching the feed from a dozen hidden cameras. The safecracker prepares his tools, and the getaway driver makes final adjustments to the car. The femme fatale watches over her crew - unlikely but convincing in her role as leader and mastermind. Soon, the expertise of all six will be tested to the max.
The scenario plays out in just about every cheesy action movie ever made. The Team consists of a loose-knit bunch of social misfits, each with his or her own special expertise. Together, they will fight crime - or commit it - we don't really care. The thing that keeps us - the audience - glued to the screen is the potential represented by the seemingly serendipitous combination of these single-minded savants. If the movies are any indication, we never get bored with this trick.
Drag-and-Drop vs. HDL?
Earlier this year we looked at LabVIEW from National Instruments as a tool for developing FPGAs (click here). This week NI is announcing a number of extensions and enhancements to LabVIEW that are intended to make it even better as an FPGA development environment.
As a reminder, LabVIEW is a wide-ranging graphical programming environment. Ignoring the vast data acquisition, instrument control and industrial automation applications (and Lego Mindstorms NXT, which is shipped with a subset of LabVIEW), LabVIEW is a good environment for creating FPGA designs: it is a drag-and-drop environment, and, unlike hardware description languages, it is inherently parallel. In 2009, NI moved to an annual programme of new versions of LabVIEW, releasing beta versions at the beginning of the year and making the final release at NI Week, so this week’s announcements are for LabVIEW 2010.
Adept Alternative
Aldec Turns up the Simulation Heat
In many markets, there is what marketers call a “gorilla” - a company with a commanding market share that controls the way the ball rolls in that particular segment. In HDL simulation for FPGAs, one could argue that ModelSim from Mentor Graphics has historically been the gorilla - with a dominant market share and OEM deals with most of the major FPGA vendors that allow them to be the first simulator out of the box when new designers start working on an FPGA design.
Aldec, Inc. has always played the role of spoiler to ModelSim’s gorilla. From the sidelines, it appeared that Aldec generally employed the “fast follower” strategy - running close behind with new features and innovations and working to win on price. The strategy worked relatively well for Aldec, who has kept a strong market share for over a decade.
Xilinx Pwns Space
Is New Rad-Hard FPGA Family a Game-Changer?
In space, no one can hear you reconfigure.
Space has always had a love/hate relationship with FPGAs. On the one hand, FPGAs are the best technology ever for space use. They eliminate the huge NRE cost associated with extremely low-volume ASIC design, they provide the possibility of in-flight reconfiguration in a location where service calls would be... expensive, to say the least, and they help get that expensive bird in the air faster with their short, low-risk design cycles.
On the other hand, SRAM FPGA technology has always been extremely uncomfortable with radiation, which, in space, is plentiful. Since the configuration logic and all of the sequential and memory elements rely on SRAM-like structures, a single wayward neutron can ruin your whole day - flipping a bit where you least expected it and causing strange things to happen very quickly.
Persistent Precision
Mentor Synthesis Makes Steady, Stealthy Progress
Probably the most under-lauded product in the FPGA landscape is Mentor Graphics’s Precision synthesis. Precision has been around in various incarnations for the better part of a decade now, quietly turning HDL into FPGA-bound netlists around the world with little fanfare or controversy.
You’ll just about never see Precision in public - it prefers to keep a low profile. It mainly hangs out on large distributed networks in the worlds’ largest electronics companies, helping to turn their experiments, prototypes, and products into FPGA reality. Precision’s loyal fans tend to keep to themselves - helping the shy, shade-wearing synthesis tool maintain its modest mode of operation and its traditional aura of mystery and intrigue.
Zen and the Art of Modelling FPGAs
What is the sound of one hand clapping? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? Why is a product specification?
The answer is not obvious: the product specification is a statement of what the product should and shouldn’t do. At the very highest level, this is simple. “We want a family of FPGAs for motor control.” Then it starts getting complicated. Before you know what has happened, you have a three-volume specification, setting out in painstaking detail every attribute and activity of the end product - possibly.
But there are huge problems with this. Firstly, how does the person requiring the product know that the requirement is accurate?
Lattice Turns up the Tools
Diamond Re-vamps Design Experience
A fabless semiconductor company (as all FPGA companies are) is a curious entity. Since the company does not own its own production line, it doesn't really make anything. It has to differentiate itself and derive all of its value purely from intellectual property and services.
FPGA architectures are now well-known entities and are mostly beyond the reach of patent protection. Any company with the appropriate financial resources (and very little risk aversion) can draw up a new FPGA architecture, send it off to a company with a semiconductor fab, and start selling chips. (Don't try this at home, however. The world is littered with the corpses of failed startup companies attempted by some very savvy members of our industry.)