E. Thomas Hart
Focusing QuickLogic's Energy

Tom Hart took physics in school and was a Bombardier-Navigator in the U.S. Navy. He knows that with proper focus you can take advantage of an exponential ratio to deliver many times more energy to a target than even a much larger unfocused source. As Chairman, President, and CEO of QuickLogic, he applies that same principle in leading his company to success. In a programmable logic industry that is blasting its light in all directions, trying to illuminate every square inch of the digital design landscape, Hart’s QuickLogic is a spotlight, concentrating its resources on solving specific, high value problems better than anyone else.

In the design-specific semiconductor world, there are highly specialized custom devices such as cell-based ASICs, more general solutions like ASSPs, and extremely general solutions like FPGAs. QuickLogic reasons that there is lots of room to work in the gap between the latter two, ASSPs and FPGAs. Where ASSPs solve one specific problem in one specific way, and general-purpose FPGAs are a blank canvas for creating a complete solution on your own, QuickLogic’s embedded standard product (ESP) devices merge these two worlds by locking the known, stable parts of an application in optimized hardware blocks, while providing a high-performance programmable fabric for adding your own custom components to the design. In today’s world of rapidly evolving standards, increased time-to-market pressure, and high demands on silicon performance, price, and power, this is often exactly what the doctor ordered. [more]

Square Root of Two to the Fortieth
Four Decades of Moore

The athlete leans for the tape, pouring his last ounce of energy into the final instant. The crowd is on its feet. A flurry of flashguns trigger, trying to capture the historic moment on digital film. There’s a brief pause as all eyes move up to the giant high-resolution display for the results. The numbers flash on the screen “Square Root of Two to the Fortieth!” The sportscaster’s voice breaks as he shouts with excitement. It’s official – a world record. The most progress ever in the history of progress itself!

Forty years ago today (April 19, 1965) Gordon Moore published his paper, ultimately predicting that integrated electronics would progress by a factor of two every two years (or by a factor of square-root of two each year, for those of us that like to annualize). Today, rather than adding our accolades to the many rightfully heaped on Mr. Moore for his astonishing insight, we’d like to celebrate the almost incomprehensible accomplishment of our profession. During the past four decades, those of us who develop digital electronics have made more progress than possibly any group on any metric in human history.

Skeptical? Let’s review a few. The wheel has improved our ability to get around by (generously) no more than a factor of one thousand. Fire has probably reduced the mortality rate by no more than an order of magnitude, and no more than tripled the habitable area of the planet. Antibiotics haven’t even doubled the human life expectancy. Take a look at our number again – 1,048,576. From roughly fifty transistors on a chip in 1965 to fifty million in 2005. Find anything else that’s increased by a factor of one million in forty years (and no fair dividing by zero! – the number of Britney Spears CDs, for example, doesn’t count.) [more]