CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES

How Many Nanometers Do I Need?
Unraveling the Node Wars (Kevin Morris)
Who Are You People?
...and What Do You Want? (Kevin Morris)
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)

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]

How Many Nanometers Do I Need?
Unraveling the Node Wars
(Kevin Morris)

Many of us toss the process node into casual conversation, pretending we know what it actually means…  “I hear that SilBlaster is already working on a 37nm FPGA based on TSMC’s medium-K, oxide-minimized, semi-strained, anti-dielectric half-pitch.”  (If you get enough things that sound like buzzwords in there, most people will be too frightened to challenge you.)

In reality, though, most of us designing products with programmable logic are pretty well insulated from the vagaries of semiconductor processes.  When I got my first car that had four valves per cylinder, I was stoked.  (We engineers are easily stoked by things that might not impress the general public.)  I took lots of people for rides around town, just waiting for that first passenger to comment “Wow, this is really a great car – I’m enjoying riding around in it much more than any of those lame 2-valve-per-cylinder models.”

Sadly, that day never came. [more]