Undertow of Ubiquity
FPGAs Abound at ESC

Over the past few years, FPGAs have risen from a whisper to a roar at the Embedded Systems Conference. This year, at the newly re-relocated event (back in San Jose after a few-year foray up to San Francisco), there was barely a booth on the show floor without boards bearing FPGAs connected to cameras, displays, LEDs, remote-control cars, bins of bouncing balls, Dance Dance Revolution sensor pads, and even to the inner-workings of our old, remarkably destructive friend Cyclonebot's 220-pound, half-inch-plate-titanium-clad frame.

Originally, FPGAs stealthily crept onto most embedded system boards wearing their innocuous "glue logic" disguise. In that role, they were barely noticed, flying in under the radar while mainstream embedded components like processors, peripherals and memory hogged the spotlight. Most embedded system designers handed off the FPGA part of the project to a junior engineer, who picked a programmable part almost at random and stuck it in between a bus and some primary pins with a simple program that compensated for differences in protocols between various connected components. Like killer viruses, the devices laid low, steadily improving their capability and integrating more and more functions from the board. Chips surrounding the FPGA started quietly disappearing in the night. Finally, the industry woke up and noticed that FPGAs had moved to center stage in most embedded system designs, challenging discrete processors for the starring role.

Many embedded designers were terrified. Previously, the typical embedded system board could be quickly assembled from off-the-shelf components by an electrical engineer with only modest experience. Design requiring dangerous levels of deep and detailed expertise (like the horror of hardware description languages) had always been safely segregated away in distant secret labs where high-end ASIC-based systems were carefully crafted by black-belt engineering savants with specialized skills. Now, custom logic design was staring the average system designer squarely in the face, and the prospects were scary. Synthesis, Simulation, Timing Analysis, and other vast and frightening unexplored wastelands loomed between embedded designers and success on their future projects. They panicked. They packed. They went to ESC.
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Parallelizing PCB
Mentor's Multi-node Router Goes Auto

Multi-madness is upon us these days. Multi-core, multi-thread, and multi-processor mania has made a mess of the previously well-ordered software tools and operating systems market, creating abundant opportunities for innovation. Single processor computing is at its heat limit, and the new way to get more cpu power focused on your problem is to pile on the processors and parallelize your application.

Much has been made in the technical press about various approaches for automatically parallelizing general-purpose computing. However, there are occasional outstanding opportunities to create domain-specific solutions that can elegantly and efficiently elevate the performance of mission-critical tasks. Mentor Graphics has found such an opportunity in printed circuit board (PCB) routing with their newly-announced "XtremeAR" tool. They have crafted a system that can accelerate the arduous task of PCB auto-routing using up to 15 networked nodes, turning multi-day turnaround times into overnight iterations.

PCB routing has become a bottleneck in many board-based system designs. Increased levels of integration have led to larger, more complex ICs, such as FPGAs, subsuming more of the functionality on a typical board. For the board layout team, this means chips with more pins and more signal integrity concerns talking to each other through more sophisticated boards, while design decisions, such as pinout specifications, are pushed until (and often seemingly beyond) the last possible minute. The result? We have more complicated board designs with less time in which to do them.

Unlike ASIC layout, PCB routing is still often a manual task. The most ambitious boards, and those with some critical analog signals, typically require both automatic and manual routing in order to get the job done effectively. In 2004, Mentor announced what it calls "Xtreme PCB," which allows multiple, geographically dispersed designers to simultaneously manually route a single board in real time over a network. This permits teams to work together productively to get a PCB design out the door, even if they work thousands of miles apart. Mentor claims that Xtreme PCB customers have been able to reduce layout cycle time for these manually routed designs by 40-70%. [more]