a techfocus media
publication :: March 9, 2004 :: volume II, no.
10
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New Products Propel FPGAs into a Broader Base One indicator of a maturing market is the introduction of products at the peripheries. New add-ons to the core capability are introduced that make the main item more valuable and useful to a wider variety of customers. Recently, a wave of new products has hit the market that promises to bring programmable logic to new audiences. These are not new devices or bigger, better, faster FPGA design tools. They are one step removed. They bring specific capabilities to specific markets that bridge the gap, allowing new projects to take advantage of programmable logic technology in a new way. Let’s look at three newly introduced technologies and how they bring new applications into the programmable logic domain. We’ll check out AccelChip’s offering that brings FPGA-based hardware acceleration within reach of DSP designers, Altium’s Nexar which allows board-based system designers to harness the power of SoC FPGAs, and Xilinx’s line of line-card solutions that promise to do for the backplane-based communications industry what FPGAs did for the, well, backplane-based communications industry, actually. [more]
A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing In 1967 Andy Granatelli showed up at the Indianapolis 500 with a different kind of race car. Instead of the usual shriek of a high-performance racing engine, the car flew past the grandstands with a quiet “whoosh”. It was faster than the other entries at the race that year – much faster. The turbine-engine car had a tremendous advantage over its reciprocating-engine rivals. Parnelli Jones drove the car in the lead for 171 laps before a simple bearing failure took it out of the competition. The question immediately arose: Is this really a race car? By jumping to a design that was more akin to a jet engine than a traditional racing powerplant, Granatelli had challenged the status quo by attacking the common notion of the underlying engineering architecture. Just over a decade later, in 1988, Dennis Conner showed up at the America’s Cup challenge with a different kind of America’s Cup yacht. Instead of the usual graceful monohull design with billowing sails, Conner’s boat was a high-tech catamaran design, comprised of two parallel streamlined hulls powered by a vertical wing-like airfoil. His Stars and Stripes catamaran beat challenger New Zealand by two of the widest margins ever recorded in the event. The question arose before the race ever began: Is this really an America’s Cup yacht? In responding to an unexpected challenge, Conner had also challenged the status quo by attacking the common notion of the design. About 16 years later, (this week, in fact) Altera announced MAX II, a new super-low- cost, low-power CPLD. Instead of the usual PAL-like macrocells arrayed on the CPLD architecture, MAX II has something no one expected: look-up tables (LUTs). This is a different kind of CPLD with higher density, lower dynamic power, and higher performance than existing CPLD families. [more]
Top-Down DSP Design Flow to Silicon Implementation
by Dan Ganousis, AccelChip, Inc. We’re on the threshold of the next wave of rapid growth in high technology. During the 1970s, we witnessed the proliferation of semiconductors that enabled the digital generation. In the 1980s came the decade of dynamic memories (DRAMs) as semiconductor vendors perfected their manufacturing technologies to allow dramatic increases in memory capacity at previously unheard of prices. The 1990s will be remembered as the era of microprocessors as even the casual consumer became extremely literate about Megahertz and motherboards. And now, as we’ve entered the new millennium, digital signal processing (DSP) has become the technology of focus with consensus expectations of exponential growth. “Everybody knows that DSP is the technology driver for the semiconductor industry,” says Will Strauss, an analyst with Forward Concepts Co., Tempe, AZ. [more]
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