CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES

Complexitango
Chaos of Our Own Making (Kevin Morris)
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

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]

Complexitango
Chaos of Our Own Making
(Kevin Morris)

For years now, FPGA companies have been proclaiming that you can use their devices to create a “System on a Chip.”  We’ve seen “SoCs,” “Programmable System-on-Chip.” “SoPC,” “Platform FPGA,” and numerous other marketing-oriented, pseudo-jargonic phraseologies.

Supposing that’s true, and we want to put a “system” onto a chip.  What exactly is a “system”?

Wikipedia tells us a “system” is a “set of interacting or interdependent entities, real or abstract, forming an integrated whole.”  An “embedded system” is widely accepted as a computer that is integrated or embedded into some other device.  For our purposes today, though, I’d like to go with the definition offered by a former colleague of mine:

“A ‘System’ is the thing one level of complexity higher than what you can understand.” [more]