610 results found for TechView: Digital, displaying items 1 - 20
August 28, 2008 Cold, Dense, And Gratis MCU Core Targets FPGAs
Did you know that at 5515 kg/m3, Earth is the densest planet in our solar system? Most of that density is made up in the Earth’s core, which became so dense during the early stages of the Earth’s 4.5 billion-year life in a process called planetary differentiation. During this process, and while the Earth was still a ball of molten elements, denser substances such as iron sank toward the center, and the dense core as we know it today was formed. Not to be...
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Daniel Harris
July 24, 2008
Multistandard Wireless Accelerator Enables Emerging Basestation Technologies
A famous cartoon coyote once called Apetitius Giganticus wanted to catch a roadrunner that sometimes went by Accelerati Incredibilus. The coyote always used some outdated technology to try to catch the roadrunner, who relied on speed and simplicity to avoid becoming lunch. So if FPGAs and ASICs are the coyote and Freescale’s MSBA8100 wireless basestation accelerator is the roadrunner, then, well, you get the picture.
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Daniel Harris
July 24, 2008 GPIO Expander Takes A Bite Out Of Power
The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Indians were known for attempting to recreate the “Midas touch,” whereby they would practice alchemy in their ongoing quest to find the perfect catalyst to turn lead to gold. Yet they forgot one important aspect of Midas’ legend. King Midas came to hate wealth and splendor and started worshipping Pan, the Greek god of nature. Thus, you could say that Midas came to love all things green. Catalyst Semiconductor had Pan in mind...
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Daniel Harris
July 10, 2008 CPLD Technology Scores A Big Green Zero
Last month, the FCX Clarity began rolling off the production line at Honda’s plant in Tochigi, Japan. The sedan is powered by the company’s V Flow fuel-cell stack, a compact lithium-ion battery pack, and a single hydrogen storage tank. According to Honda, it has a 280-mile driving range and gets 72 miles/kg-H2, or the equivalent of 74 mpg of gasoline. Three-year leases will be available for $600 a month to customers living in Southern California near publicly accessible...
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Daniel Harris
May 22, 2008 Dive Into New Markets With Platform FPGA
The “F” in FPGA could easily stand for flexible, rather than field. In fact, the flexibility that today’s FPGAs provide is far more important than the ability to program a device while in the field, at least for most designers. And since Xilinx leads the industry where flexibility is concerned, it seems only natural that its latest offering, the Virtex-5 FXT, provides a nice platform to build your next system or device family around. With flexibility in...
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Daniel Harris
May 22, 2008 DDR2 Memory Serves Up An Ace
In the interest of all things “green” and with server energy consumption ever increasing, there is a great desire to lower power consumption where possible, especially as energy costs continue to soar. Noting these trends, Samsung Semiconductor’s latest DDR2 memory dual-inline memory module (DIMM) enables servers to score an ace in the low-power department. These fully buffered modules offer between 1 Gbyte and 8 Gbytes of capacity and provide up to 50% power...
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Daniel Harris
May 22, 2008 TSMC Announces First 40-nm Process
Earlier this spring, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) revealed its 40-nm semiconductor process technology. Its portfolio includes embedded DRAM, mixed-signal, RF, and multi-project wafer (MPW) prototyping. The process improves gate density by a factor of 2.35 over 65 nm. It also reduces active power usage up to 15% over 45 nm and provides the smallest SRAM cell size and macro size in the industry, according to the company. The process is available in...
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Daniel Harris
May 8, 2008 The "Ferros" Would Be Proud Of This New NVM
In ancient Egypt, the Horus of Gold represented a form of a pharaoh’s name most typically thought to mean “superior to his foes” and associated with eternity. These qualities would be highly desirable in any nonvolatile memory (NVM) product. Now suppose you could take a standard serial flash memory and add virtually unlimited endurance and the ability to perform write operations at bus speed. That’s right—no write delays after data reaches the memory device, and...
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Daniel Harris
April 24, 2008
Carbon To Replace Copper On Semiconductor Superhighways
Copper has had plenty of time in the sun as a medium for electrons to travel to work each day. And although it has only been used in semiconductor interconnects for about 10 years, its days may be limited thanks to carbon. The debate on using carbon nanotubes (CNTs) for semiconductor interconnects has been ongoing for a while now, but recent research indicates that carbon offers first-class service to travel-weary electrons.
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Daniel Harris
April 10, 2008 SERDES IP Releases Tackle Top Speeds
Untitled Document High-speed design and serial buses used for chip-to-chip communications seem to go hand in hand nowadays. Whether youâ??re talking signal integrity, printed-circuit board (PCB) routability,...
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Daniel Harris
March 17, 2008
Rad-Tolerant FPGA Gets Ready For Blastoff
Engineering for space (as in less than 3 degrees Kelvin) requires a greater emphasis on radiation tolerance, mass, size, power consumption, and reliability. But since space applications are typically low-count, FPGAs can play a crucial role in their development and deployment. The latest part in Actel’s RTAX-S family, the RTAX4000S, is a 4 million-gate rad-tolerant FPGA qualified for MIL-STD 883 Class B.
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Daniel Harris
March 13, 2008 FPGA Gets The Hang Of Low Power
Until recently, low-power FPGAs were about as oxymoronic as bipartisan cooperation and bug-free code. But the FPGA landscape is changing for the better as more vendors can say with a straight face that they offer low-power FPGAs without having their marketing guy laughed out of the room. Not only that, but FPGAs also have been getting more and more design wins in battery-based portable applications in which low power consumption is...
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Daniel Harris
March 13, 2008 10 FPGA Tricks Provide Power-Saving Treats
1. Select an FPGA with an ASIC-like power profile. That means no inrush power, no boot-up configuration power, ultra-low standby power (especially over extended temperature ranges), and low dynamic power. Low-power and secure in-system programmability allow secure design modifications and field upgrades. 2. Look for single-chip, small-form-factor (portable-friendly) FPGAs. The ASIC-like form factor is the smallest footprint available ...
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Fares Mubarak
February 14, 2008 Save Cold Cash On ColdFire
ColdFire MCUs have been part of Freescale’s 68K family since 1994. Because of their popularity, the company has decided to make the 32-bit V1 ColdFire core available to the embedded community through IPextreme, an IP licensing company. Yet the ever-competitive MCU core market has prompted IPextreme to offer V1 ColdFire for as low as $10,000. “By offering the V1 ColdFire core to developers at the $10K threshold, Freescale and IPextreme...
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Daniel Harris
December 13, 2007 Terabyte Bandwidth Initiative Allows Signals To Board At Any Station And Still Arrive On Time
Christmas is coming early for system designers who want up to a terabyte of bandwidth as well as simplified pc-board layout. As part of its Terabyte Bandwidth Initiative (TBI), Rambus responded with a neat ideaâ??place more data bits on a given pin for a given clock transition than the typical one-bitper- pin per transition. The company also has devised a technology that allows for mismatches in trace length. For example, the DDR3 protocol allows for...
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Daniel Harris
November 15, 2007 Signal Integrity Gets The Plug & Play Treatment
It’s hard to beat plug & play as a hot buzzword over the past few years. Often, the term conjures up images of Microsoft Windows. Now, Altera is getting into the mix with Plug & Play Signal Integrity. The company’s hot-swappable FPGA device uses low-power linear adaptive equalization technology—Altera’s Adaptive Dispersion Compensation Engine (ADCE). Plug & Play Signal Integrity gives system architects hot-socketable Stratix II GX...
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Daniel Harris
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