Giving Cars A Bird’s-Eye View


Will the world be a better place in which to live by having autonomous cars driving around us? Or would it be unsafe and scary? Maybe someone was asking such a question even when the first steam-powered automobile capable of human transportation was built in 1769 [1]! As a person who likes driving, I wouldn’t like to have a ‘fully’ autonomous car, but I would like to get some assistanc... » read more

Accelerate SoC Simulation Time of Newer Generation FPGAs


Comprehensive verification that can be provided by HDL simulators is good, but not ideal. What is necessary is a faster, safer, and more thorough verification environment that combines the robustness of an HDL simulator with the speed of FPGA prototyping boards. The goal is to put together the power of these two verification methodologies into one platform. Read more. » read more

Machine Learning Shifts More Work to FPGAs, SoCs


A wave of machine-learning-optimized chips is expected to begin shipping in the next few months, but it will take time before data centers decide whether these new accelerators are worth adopting and whether they actually live up to claims of big gains in performance. There are numerous reports that silicon custom-designed for machine learning will deliver 100X the performance of current opt... » read more

Is Software Necessary?


Hardware must be capable of running any software. While that might have been a good mantra when chips were relatively simple, it becomes an impossible verification task when dealing with SoCs that contain dozens of deeply embedded processors. When does it become necessary to use production software and what problems can that get you into? When verification targets such as power are added, it... » read more

New 5G Hurdles


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about challenges and progress in 5G with Yorgos Koutsoyannopoulos, president and CEO of Helic; Mike Fitton, senior director of strategic planning and business development at Achronix; Sarah Yost, senior product marketing manager at National Instruments; and Arvind Vel, director of product management at ANSYS. What follows are excerpts of that conversat... » read more

PCIe In High-Performance FPGAs


In today's world, when the entire computing industry is talking about high-performance and high-speed applications using FPGAs, what are the factors that can assure such performance and speed? The value and success of today’s high performance computing applications in the areas of DNA Sequencing, High Frequency Trading (HFT) and Encryption/Decryption are predicated upon how fast data can be t... » read more

FPGAs Drive Deeper Into Cars


FPGAs are reaching deeper and wider inside of automobiles, playing an increasingly important role across more systems within a vehicle as the electronic content continues to grow. The role of FPGAs in automotive cameras and sensors is already well established. But they also are winning sockets inside of a raft of new technologies, ranging from the AI systems that will become the central logi... » read more

Embedded FPGA Design Considerations


Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix, talks about interconnects, memory, different design approaches, and why foundry processes are critical to eFPGA design. https://youtu.be/FngrgDnJn9c » read more

SoC FPGAs And HW/SW Co-Simulation


Heterogeneous System on Chip (SoC) devices like the Xilinx Zynq 7000 and Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC combine a high-performance processing system (PS) with state-of-the-art programmable logic (PL). This combination allows a system to be architected to provide an optimally balanced single-chip software/hardware solution. However, all too often, the integration between the PS and PL takes place late... » read more

FPGAs Becoming More SoC-Like


FPGAs are blinged-out rockstars compared to their former selves. No longer just a collection of look-up tables (LUTs) and registers, FPGAs have moved well beyond into now being architectures for system exploration and vehicles for proving a design architecture for future ASICs. This family of devices now includes everything from basic programmable logic all the way up to complex SoC devices.... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →