Recent Blog Posts
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More litigation plagues the EDA industry
Add Cadence and Berkeley Design Automation (BDA) to the list of EDA litigants that will be making more lawyers wealthy in Silicon Valley. First, Synopsys filed suit against Mentor Graphics in September last year, in an attempt to clear their path to an acquisition of Emulation and Verification Engineering (EVE), producer of the ZeBu ASIC [...]
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Cadence Design Systems to acquire DSP IP provider Tensilica
Cadence Design Systems announced today that they intend to acquire Tensilica, a provider of Silicon Intellectual Property (SIP) for Digital Signal Processing (DSP) applications, for approximately $380M. The announcement follows Cadence’s February 7, 2013 announcement that they would acquire Cosmic Circuits, a design house based in India, which provides SIP for analog and mixed-signal applications, [...]
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Achronix begins shipping first 22nm FinFET FPGAs
Achronix, a startup in Santa Clara, CA that is building “application targeted” FPGAs, has announced that it has begun shipping their first product – the Speedster®22i HD1000. The company is collaborating with Intel, who is manufacturing the Achronix FPGAs in their 22nm, 3-D Tri-Gate (I.e. FinFET) transistor technology, and also has contributed design IP for the Speedster [...]
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Altera collaborates with ARM for FPGA SoC toolkit integration
Altera has begun shipping sample quantities of their 28nm Cyclone V SoCs, with the first product being the integration of a dual core ARM Cortex A9 and the 110 KLE FPGA fabric, the largest device in the family. Chris Balough, Senior Director of Product Marketing for SoC FPGA Products at Altera, says that the devices offer an [...]
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Tektronix Certus 2.0 eases debug of ASIC FPGA prototypes
Tektronix, Inc., has introduced version 2.0 of its Certus ASIC prototyping debug solution, building on capability the company acquired with their purchase of Veridae Systems in July, 2011. Certus integrates directly with RTL design flows, so that verification engineers can more easily incorporate embedded instruments to increase their visibility of ASIC prototype behavior. Brad Quinton, Chief [...]
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Microsemi announces SmartFusion2 FPGA SoCs
Microsemi has announced the next-generation of their FPGA SoCs, the SmartFusion2 family, which combine a flash-based FPGA fabric with a 166 MHz ARM Cortex-M3 processor on a single chip. The SmartFusion2 will be available in configurations from 5K 4-input Look-Up Tables (LUT) to 120K LUT. The Microprocessor Sub-System (MSS) in the SmartFusion2 consists of a 166 MHz ARM Cortex-M3 [...]
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FPGAs speed trading on Wall Street
The degree to which financial markets are now run by computers, for better or worse, was brought into the news headlines recently when Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. – the owners of the NASDAQ stock exchange – proposed to pay US$62 million to brokers as compensation for losses attributed to trading “glitches” during Facebook’s now infamous [...]
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Xilinx CTO makes case for the value of programmability in SEMICON West keynote
At the SEMICON West tradeshow in San Francisco this week, Ivo Bolsens, Senior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Xilinx, delivered a keynote address titled ”All Programmable – from Silicon to System“. In his presentation to this semiconductor manufacturing industry audience, Dr. Bolsens made his case for how a fabless company such as Xilinx can work [...]
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New entrants target the need for custom DSPs in wireless applications
The demand for various forms of wireless connectivity continues to explode, driving more complex requirements for flexible, high-performance, yet low-power DSP in multi-mode baseband processors. In designing a DSP for wireless applications, engineers are challenged to support an increasing number of air interfaces and protocols, from multiple 3G and 4G configurations to new modes of [...]
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Xilinx introduces new Targeted Design Platforms at NAB show
Xilinx and Tokyo Electron Device Ltd. have developed a new Display TDP for 4K2K Display applications Xilinx has launched a new set of Targeted Design Platforms (TDP), at the 2102 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas this week. The Display TDP supports development of content for emerging quad High Definition 4K2K (Quad [...]
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MathWorks Introduces HDL Coder and Verifier For MATLAB
MathWorks Inc. has announced HDL Coder for MATLAB, a tool that enables algorithm developers and system engineers to automatically generate synthesizable VHDL and Verilog code from models they have written in the company’s MATLAB language. Engineers can use the tool, which was previously available only in MathWorks Simulink, to implement FPGA programming or for ASIC prototyping and design. According [...]
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Analog advances defy logic
If you took notice of the pun in the title of this column, it was intended. I frequently see attempts to frame discussions of analog design from a digital perspective, a view in which Boolean logic reduces the world to ones and zeros. Such a discussion took place at the DesignCon 2012 on January 31, [...]
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Xilinx rolls out 7-Series FPGA design kits and DSP reference platform
Xilinx has announced availability of the first design kits and Targeted Design Platform (TDP) for the company’s latest 28nm Kintex-7 and Virtex-7 FPGAs. The kits were developed through a close partnership between Xilinx and their Alliance Members – 4DSP Inc., Analog Devices Inc., Avnet Electronics Marketing, Northwest Logic, MathWorks, Texas Instruments, and Xylon. According to [...]
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CEVA adapts DSP core for DTV demodulator applications
CEVA is a developer of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) cores, which they license in the form of synthesizable (i.e. soft) Intellectual Property (IP) for integration in Systems on a Chip (SoCs). By partnering with providers of application-specific software IP, CEVA has been able to adapt the soft-modem architecture of the CEVA-XC323 core for use in a [...]
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TI DSP Evaluation Board for Scientific Research and Product Development
This evaluation board is an ideal tool for study and experimentation and for applications such as scientific research and product development.
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Xilinx Expands Targeted Design Platforms for Industrial Networking and Motor Control Applications
Xilinx has announced plans to add to their Targeted Design Platform for industrial applications by extending their offering from the low cost 45nm Spartan-6 FPGAs, to the new 28nm Artix-7 and Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform (EPP). Yvonne Lin, Industrial Marketing Manager at Xilinx, says that the company participates in the industrial market in both the [...]
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Xilinx ISE Design Suite 13.3 Full Custom Precision Floating-Point Support Extends Productivity for DSP Designers
Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) announced the availability of ISE(r) Design Suite 13.3 featuring new capabilities for DSP designers to easily implement bit-accurate single, double and full custom precision floating-point math operations in their designs targeting wireless, medical, aerospace and defense, high-performance computing and video applications.
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Altera announces SoC FPGAs with dual-core ARM Cortex A9 and virtual prototyping support
Altera has announced development of a family of ARM-based SoC FPGAs, which will provide users with single-chip solutions that integrate a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor with Altera’s low power Cyclone V and Arria V FPGA fabrics. Todd Koelling, Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Embedded Processors at Altera, says that the SoC FPGA processor system will [...]
Mike Demler, Editorial Director
Mike Demler, Editorial Director
Mike Demler, Editorial Director
GAO Embedded Inc.