Developing A Real-Time SDR System


As telecommunication technologies evolve there is an on-going drive for the development of high-performance systems for radio communications. Part of that evolution involves implementing components in software functions that had traditionally been implemented in hardware. Software-defined radio (SDR) is a prime example. Significant amounts of signal processing have been handed over to the ge... » read more

Cross Spectrum Video Processing


While immunization vaccines are rolling out at an impressive pace, and as society slowly reopens, our best defense against the Coronavirus continues to be early detection and rapid response (such as self-isolation). An early symptom of having the virus is an increased body temperature, which can be easily measured using contactless methods such as thermal sensors or cameras sensitive to IR r... » read more

Processing With FPGAs On Mars


Tasked with finding life in the form of microorganisms, the rover Perseverance landed on Mars at about 04:00 EST on February 18, 2021. The rover has multiple sensors and cameras to collect as much data as possible and, due to the volume of live data being recorded and the long data transmission time from Mars to Earth, a powerful processing system is essential. However, whereas early Mars ro... » read more

Logic Synthesis Basics For FPGA


In the early days of digital design, all circuits were designed manually. You would draw K-map, optimize the logic and draw the schematics. If you remember, we all did many logic optimization exercises back in college. It was time consuming and very error prone. This works fine for designs with a few hundred gates, but as the designs get larger and larger this became non-feasible. Design... » read more

Linting RISC-V Designs


As the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) continues to gain momentum, the growing number of RISC-V design solutions and their flexibility creates a problem when choosing the most reliable and robust solution from a number of contenders. Sure, a RISC-V IP design must be compliant to basic ISA standards and should contain a testing suite demonstrating that compliance. But sh... » read more

Setting Up An Embedded Development Board For Cloud-Based IoT Service


Everyday there are new devices appearing in homes, offices, hospitals, factories and thousands of other places that are part of the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Clearly, they need to be connected to the internet and there is a need for a huge amount of raw data to be collected, stored and processed on the cloud. There are many data centers available to store the data. However, only some provide... » read more

Connecting Emulated Designs To Real PCIe Devices


These days verification teams no longer question whether hardware assisted verification should be used in their projects. Rather, they ask at which stage they should start using it. Contemporary System-on-Chip (SoC) designs are already sufficiently complex to make HDL simulation a bottleneck during verification, without even mentioning hardware-software co-verification or firmware and softwa... » read more

Developing 4K Video Projects With FPGAs


Achieving higher resolution is a never-ending race for camera, TV and display manufacturers. After the emergence of 4K ultra high definition (Ultra HD) imaging in the market, it became the main standard for today’s multimedia products. 4K Ultra HD brings us bigger screens which give an immersive feeling. With this standard, the pixilation problem was solved in the big screens. 4K consumers ar... » read more

SoC Co-Emulation Using Zynq Boards


Have you ever worked on a group project where you had to combine your work with that of a colleague of a different engineering discipline but the absence of an efficient means of doing so affected the project’s overall outcome? Well, for software and hardware engineers developing an SoC, the merging of their respective engineering efforts for verification purposes is a big challenge. Early... » read more

Evaluating NVMe SSD Multi-Gigabit Performance


The multi-channel parallelism and low-latency access of NAND flash technology have made Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) based SSDs very popular within the main segments of the data storage market, including not only the consumer electronics sector but also data center processing and acceleration services, where the key role is played by specialized FPGA-based hardware for application-specifi... » read more

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