Mike Demler, Editorial Director —
With the increasing complexity of FPGA system design, developers could use a kick-start on their projects. Xilinx is answering that call with a pair of base design kits for their 28 nm Kintex-7 and Virtex-7 FPGAs, each built on PCI Express PCBs. The kits come with just about all the hardwa...
Mike Demler, Editorial Director —
To deliver on the performance expectations for 4G LTE networks, operators will need to deploy a mix of low-cost pico and femto cells, along with lower power macro cell base stations, to meet green energy requirements. Texas Instruments has stepped up to the plate and delivered with its TCI...
Mike Demler, Editorial Director —
Semiconductor IP vendors have traditionally competed on power, performance, and area, but having a full suite of supporting software is increasingly critical to enable SoC integration. Synopsys is addressing this need by combining assets from several acquisitions over the past several year...
Mike Demler, Editorial Director —
Longer battery life is a critical need for many of today's most powerful mobile devices. Device manufacturers also struggle to differentiate their devices, with the same few application processors now showing up in everything from smartphones to tablets to notebook PCs. Lattice Semiconduct...
Mike Demler, Editorial Director —
With the increasing complexity of FPGA system design, developers could use a kick-start on their projects. Xilinx is answering that call with a pair of base design kits for their 28 nm Kintex-7 and Virtex-7 FPGAs, each built on PCI Express PCBs. The kits come with just about all the hardwa...
Mike Demler, Editorial Director —
Silicon Intellectual Property (SIP) provider CEVA, Inc. has added HSPA+ software libraries for the CEVA-XC DSP core to the company’s Software-Defined Radio (SDR) reference architecture offering. The library enables designers to implement a complete software-based multimode HSPA/HSPA+...
Mike Demler, Editorial Director —
Xilinx and Cadence Design Systems have collaborated to develop a virtual platform that enables software engineers to perform pre-silicon system design, software development, and testing of the Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform (EPP). Xilinx has targeted the first silicon for the Zyn...
Mike Demler, Editorial Director —
Altera has announced development of a family of ARM-based SoC FPGAs, which will provide users with single-chip solutions that integrate an industrial-grade dual-core 800 MHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor with Altera’s 28 nm low-power Cyclone V and Arria V FPGAs. Each core in the Altera SoC...
Mike Demler, Editorial Director —
Texas Instruments (TI) has claimed the lowest price in the industry for a DSP, offering the ultra-low-power TMS320C553x series starting at $1.95 (for the TMS320C5532) in quantities of 1,000 units. TI is also offering the C5535 eZdsp development kit for the C553x DSPs, discounted to $55 thr...
Mike Demler, Editorial Director —
The Xilinx Virtex-7 2000T heralds the next era of Moore’s Law, in which 3D stacking of ICs will take over for two-dimensional scaling. The decades-long doubling of device density that has been achieved by shrinking transistors with each new processor generation is approaching limits...
Chris A. Ciufo, Editor
Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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...
Chris A. Ciufo, Editor
Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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...
Chris A. Ciufo, Editor
Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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...
Chris A. Ciufo, Editor
Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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...
Chris A. Ciufo, Editor
Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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...
Chris A. Ciufo, Editor
Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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...
Chris A. Ciufo, Editor
Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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...
Chris A. Ciufo, Editor
Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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...
Chris A. Ciufo, Editor
Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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...
Chris A. Ciufo, Editor
Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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...
