Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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...
Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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+...
Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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...
Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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...
Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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...
Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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, OpenSystems Media and
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, OpenSystems Media and
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, OpenSystems Media and
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, OpenSystems Media and
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, OpenSystems Media and
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, OpenSystems Media and
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, OpenSystems Media and
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, OpenSystems Media and
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, OpenSystems Media and
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, OpenSystems Media and
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...
Chris A. Ciufo, Editor, OpenSystems Media and
Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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...
Chris A. Ciufo, Editor, OpenSystems Media and
Sharon Hess, Managing Editor —
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...
