Chris A. Ciufo, Editor, OpenSystems Media
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Mentor's Precision Synthesis Melds with Altera Stratix IV GT
The thing about the competitive world of high-end FPGAs is that they get bigger (gate density-wise), faster, and more complex. Xilinx now has Virtex-6; Altera’s got Stratix IV GT. If you stick with these vendors’ own tools, you’re golden. But you might be missing some adv...
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(CHAIS)ing the dream: 100 Gigasamples per second for Analog to Digital Converters
Reality doesn’t byte. The real world is analog, so converting signals into the digital realm is really important. Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe thinks so, too. The company’s new CHArge-mode Interleaved Sampler technology (CHAIS) achieves sampling rates up to 100 GSa/s for ana...
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Digitizer boards have what it takes for high channel count signal processing
Ultra-wideband signal processing requires getting the real-world signals into and out of the front-end DSP processors with minimal latency and maximum signal integrity. The Triton V-5 from TEK Microsystems combines ultra-fast ADC and DAC channels with three Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs, while the...
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Cost-effective prototyping for space-flight FPGAs
Though Altera and Xilinx FPGAs are used in space-based applications such as satellites and spacecraft, Actel has the market cornered on Class-S style rad-hard FPGAs. Trouble is: they aren't cheap, and RTAX anti-fuse devices are one-time programmable, making them expensive to burn during p...
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Harsh environment PrPMC with FPGA
Sometimes less is more. Consider the PrPMC520 from AcQ. The single FPGA-based ProcessorPMC (PrPMC) mezzanine board brings simple elegance to rugged, conduction-cooled embedded military designs. Based on the Freescale MPC5200B CPU running at a relatively sedate 396 MHz, the PowerPC 603e-bas...
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TI targets portable, connected, floating point, and low cost
Any old microcontroller or FPGA can string together ALUs or multipliers and call itself an algorithm processor while crunching fixed point arithmetic. But real world signals are unpredictable and can create wildly varying extremes such that only wide dynamic range can process them. In this...
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VCXO? Don't need 'em no more.
Voltage-controlled crystal oscillators (VCXO) are the preferred way to provide stable clock references in high-precision cellular base stations or frequency-sensitive A/D front end sensors. But VCXOs consume real estate, power, and cost…and they can be tricky to design with. National...
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A "C Change" — from Linux to FPGAs and Processors
We’re having that nirvana-like dream where one imagines programming FPGAs in a high-level language such as C and not having to deal with any of that semiconductor stuff. A fantasy? Not according to Impulse Accelerated Technology, who assert that their software-to-FPGA tools now work...
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RT Hypervisor for XP on x86
We are thoroughly convinced that no matter how enamored the world is with FPGAs for signal processing, multi-core general purpose CPUs are going to soon be competing at the low end with FPGAs. The same thing happened between bit slice and general purpose DSPs, then between GP DSPs and FPGA...
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Making the grade: Programmable device offers high capacity and reliability for military
Programmable logic is now de rigeur in defense systems – but density and extended temp range are absolute requirements in high-rel applications. QuickLogic offers the 1 million gate version of their PolarPro family, their low-power programmable logic technology in a Mil-spec temperat...
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Video on the go across different set-top devices
Media convergence is happening in your living room. Streaming movies, prime time shows via iTunes, and video podcasts all require heavy lifting. TI’s got you covered with their DaVinci technology digital media processor for video transcoding in media gateways, multipoint control unit...
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Single chip can shape L+R audio equalization
Need to equalize left and right channels? No problemo. There’s now a reference design to allow a single Quickfilter Technologies QF1D512 Simple and versatile FIR engine (SavFIRe) IC to be configured to provide multichannel filtering. This way, designers can implement audio equalizati...
