His eyes meet the goalie’s steely gaze. He refuses to be stared down. In his mind, he calmly visualizes the moves to come, picturing success at each step. He will take three measured strides before his right foot strikes the ball slightly below center. He will follow through with his leg and keep his eyes riveted to the goal as the penalty kick tracks an arcing path through the air, catching the upper right corner of the net just out of the goalie’s reach. He exhales and begins the carefully choreographed sequence. As he nears his third step, a flash of light catches his eye. It distracts him for only an instant, but it is enough. The kick goes wide, and the ball bounces off the front of the approaching vehicle.

“Do overs! Do overs! Interference! There was a car!” shouts one of his teammates. The boys gather around, and after a brief negotiation, the goal is adjusted in the street, time is rewound, and the sequence begins again. The mistake is erased. The wrong has been righted, and fairness prevails. [more]

Advancing FPGA Design Efficiency:
A Proven Standard Solution
by Ian Mackintosh, OCP-IP

For decades the SoC design community has consistently lost ground in the battle to match advances in design technology productivity with the growth of available silicon technology. The silicon evolution roadmap has long been chronicled via Moore’s law, so how could the design community allow the existence of the well-known “Design Gap?” Understanding how we got to this point will make it easier to answer that question and make reasonable adjustments for the future, especially if there are obvious things to be learned from the evolution of many analogous industries.

Even in the advanced design field of FPGAs today; most FPGA IP is vendor-supplied and locks the purchasing company into the vendor it was purchased from. This paradigm limits the amount of growth that can happen in industry. In order for the market to grow as a whole, FPGA IP vendors must support and adopt industry standards. By embracing and adopting more standards into FPGAs we can ensure the time to market and cost advantages of standard FPGA IP are met. [more]