CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES

The Right Equipment
Dodging the Cheap Board Sucker Punch
(Kevin Morris)
Renaissance FAEs
Our Once and Future Saviors
(Kevin Morris)
Building an FPGA Design Repository
by Tom Dewey, Mentor Graphics Corporation
Two Chips Or One?
Avnet Provides a Daughter-card SERDES Solution for Spartan (Bryon Moyer)
A Passel of Processors
NVIDIA’s Tesla T10P Blurs Some Lines
(Kevin Morris)
Employing an I/O Interlocutor
FMCs Decouple FPGAs from Complex I/Os
(Bryon Moyer)

JOURNAL WEBCASTS

CHALK TALK Power Matters. Trying to tame power consumption in your battery-powered device? Join Journal Webcasts host Amelia Dalton as she chats with Wendy Lockhart of Actel about how you can use ultra-low power programmable devices from Actel in even the most power-sensitive designs. (Actel)

CHALK TALK Creating Secure Mobile Devices With Open Kernel Labs OKL4. In this Chalk Talk, Amelia Dalton delves into the world of software security and microkernels in mobile devices with Gernot Heiser and Rob McCammon of Open Kernel Labs. (Open Kernel Labs)

CHALK TALK Low Power Design With Xilinx and Linear Technology. Join Amelia Dalton as she chats with Mark Moran of Xilinx and Afshin Odabaee of Linear Technology about low power FPGA based designs. (Xilinx)

CHALK TALK Designing Embedded Systems With Linux and low cost FPGAs. Join Amelia Dalton as she chats with industry experts about simplifying embedded systems design with Linux running on low-cost programmable system-on-chip platforms. (Xilinx)

CHALK TALK Lowest Total System Cost With Xilinx
Spartan-3. Amelia Dalton chats with Mark Moran of Xilinx about reducing your overall system cost with Xilinx Spartan-3 family of FPGAs (Xilinx)

[click here for more webcasts]

The Right Equipment
Dodging the Cheap Board Sucker Punch (Kevin Morris)

Alpe d’Huez loomed large ahead.  His team had been supporting and protecting him until now, keeping him squarely in the running for the yellow jersey.  Today, however, he’d have to prove himself on his own – without the benefit of the drag-reducing veil of his teammates’ slipstream shadow.  Years of training, and it all came down to this – the classic weed-out mountain stage of the tour.

The unruly crowd cheered, and the adrenaline went straight to his soul.  He felt like he was flying up the hill.  As the slope increased, however, his quadriceps began to burn.  He felt himself begin to wilt.  Other competitors breezed by with ease.  His bike felt heavy and lethargic.  Well, it was, actually.  As his mind lost focus, he began to feel doubts – doubts about some of the equipment decisions he’d made.

Professional bicycles are expensive, you see.  A custom, competitive mountain-stage bike weighing in at just under 15 pounds (6.8 Kg) costs thousands of dollars.  He’d found a bargain ride at Wal-Mart for less than 10% of that price.  Really, who could say “no” to a 90%+ savings?  There were a few tradeoffs, of course.  [more]