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FPGA / CPLD Articles

• Why Transceiver-Rich FPGAs Are Suitable for Vehicle Infotainment System Designs (Aug. 08, 2024)
  The increase in the number, size and quality of displays inside the cabin marks a profound shift in interior design philosophy, from the car as a mobility product to the car as an entertainment hub and workspace.
  
  
• Where automotive FPGAs stand in smart car designs (Dec. 14, 2022)
  The automotive industry has gotten its fair share of time in the spotlight in recent years. Part of the focus has revolved around how important semiconductors are to modern vehicle designs equipped with smart technology capabilities.
  
  
• FPGA Market Trends with Next-Gen Technology (May. 09, 2022)
  Due to their excellent performance and versatility, FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) appeal to a wide spectrum of businesses. Also, it has the feature of adopting new standards and modifying hardware as per the specific application requirement even after it’s been deployed for usage
  
  
• Resilience in Space: Designing Radiation-Tolerant Systems (Oct. 22, 2021)
  Space is easily the most challenging environment for IC designers. Without Earth’s atmosphere to protect them, electronic systems are vulnerable to high-energy (ionizing) radiation including alpha and beta particles, gamma and x-rays as well as galactic cosmic radiation.
  
  
• Economics of the FPGA (Oct. 14, 2021)
  Today’s world is full of high-tech gadgets with increasingly complex functionality and capabilities that were historically the stuff of science fiction. When we use our connected devices and snap high-definition photos with our “supercomputer” cellphones, few of us give a thought to the underlying technology.
  
  
• FPGAs - The Logical Solution to the Microcontroller Shortage (Aug. 20, 2021)
  Today’s marketplace is getting heavily disrupted by the current semiconductor chip shortage that has hampered our manufacturing production lines. This is evident by the limited supply of products available.
  
  
• FPGA comes back into its own as edge computing and AI catch fire (May. 20, 2021)
  The saturation of mobile devices and ubiquitous connectivity has steeped the world in an array of wireless connectivity, from the growing terrestrial and non-terrestrial cellular infrastructure and supporting fiber and wireless backhaul networks to the massive IoT ecosystem with newly developed protocols and SoCs to support the billions of sensor nodes intended to send data to the cloud.
  
  
• How flash-based FPGAs simplify functional safety requirements (Jun. 20, 2018)
  As the quantity of industrial equipment controlled by electronics grows, so do concerns over the equipment failing and causing personal harm and property damage.
  
  
• Embedded Computing on the Edge (Jun. 07, 2018)
  Embedded computing has passed—more or less unscathed—through many technology shifts and marketing fashions. But the most recent—the rise of edge computing—could mean important new possibilities and challenges.
  
  
• How FPGA technology is evolving to meet new mid-range system requirements (May. 09, 2018)
  Multiple trends are sending FPGAs down two distinct development paths. On one path, FPGAs are being optimized primarily to accelerate data center workloads. The data center focus is the next holy grail that the larger vendors are laser-focused on.
  
  
• Test-Driven Hardware Development: True or False? (Feb. 26, 2018)
  Few generalizations about hardware design are more widely accepted than this: it is better to find errors early. And yet the traditional design-then-verify flow gives errors ample time to embed themselves in the design before even starting to look for them. It need not be so.
  
  
• Realizing 5G New Radio massive MIMO systems (Jan. 15, 2018)
  The digital implementation in 16nm FinFET versus 65nm (typically used for analog RF components) results in more than 10× area reduction and 4× power reduction. Xilinx has innovated ideal design solutions to implement power integrity, digital calibration loops for high precision, and robust isolation strategies.
  
  
• 5G on the Road to Reality (Dec. 19, 2017)
  5G is moving forward. From a vague notion of the next big thing in wireless, to a loosely defined set of goals that all but invited overpromising, to an increasingly solid set of use cases and technical standards proposals, 5G is rapidly converging on realizable objectives and implementable standards.
  
  
• Programmable Logic Holds the Key to Addressing Device Obsolescence (Dec. 19, 2017)
  The use of programmable devices helps designers not only to address component obsolescence, but also to reduce the cost and complexity of the solution.
  
  
• Securing IoT Devices can be Never-Ending (Nov. 16, 2017)
  Securing an IoT device can become, as we shall see shortly, a nearly infinite regression at nearly infinite cost.
  
  
• Hot Chips Heralds Heterogeneity (Oct. 23, 2017)
  The annual Hot Chips conference in Silicon Valley offers a reliable window into the architectural thinking of both CPU giants and exciting start-ups. This year proved to be no exception, as architects squared off against the limitations of physics and the demands of workloads, with special attention going to the trending task of the year, deep learning.
  
  
• Learning from the Next-Gen Firewall (Sep. 13, 2017)
  Torrents of packets will cascade into the data center: endless streams of data from the Internet of Things (IoT), massive flows of cellular network traffic into virtualized network functions, bursts of input to Web applications. And hidden in the cascades, far darker bits try to slip through: cyber attacks.
  
  
• A Gesture Toward Change (Aug. 10, 2017)
  This article is about the difference, and the profound change that difference has triggered in the architecture of motor control.
  
  
• Can 10 Gbps Ethernet be an Embedded Design Solution? (Jul. 03, 2017)
  10 Gbps Ethernet (10GbE) has established itself as the standard way to connect server cards to the top-of-rack (ToR) switch in data-center racks. So what’s it doing in the architectural plans for next-generation embedded systems? It is a tale of two separate but connected worlds.
  
  
• In-Memory Computing Versus Data Center Networks (Jun. 21, 2017)
  For data-center architects it seems like a no-brainer. For a wide variety of applications, from the databases behind e-commerce platforms to the big-data tools in search engines to suddenly-fashionable data analytics to scientific codes, the dominant limitation on application response time is storage latency.
  
  
• Maybe It's Time to Go Custom (May. 26, 2017)
  You could substantially increase the performance of your system with one little change. Or you could take a big bite out of energy consumption. Or you could greatly strengthen the security of your system. All with one little change of habit. If you are a car or bicycle enthusiast, you probably pay attention to custom cars or bespoke bicycle frames. So why not consider a customized CPU?
  
  
• FPGA-Based Functional Safety for Industrial Applications (May. 10, 2017)
  For industrial applications, the overall average lifetime of manufacturing equipment is growing, and designers need to utilize and deploy components that will work reliably for decades.
  
  
• Who Cares About Quantum Computing? (Apr. 27, 2017)
  Every now and then we see a flurry of news about quantum computing. But one recent piece rather focused the mind: a company claimed to have an encryption algorithm you will soon need, when quantum computers render today’s encryption algorithms useless.
  
  
• Inferring the Future of Machine Learning (Apr. 17, 2017)
  Deep-learning networks have won. They have outscored humans in classifying still images—at least sort-of. They have defeated world champions at chess and go. They have become the tool of choice for big-data analysis challenges, from customer service to medical diagnosis. They have shown that, once trained, they can be compact enough to fit in a smart phone. So have we reached the end of history for artificial intelligence (AI)? Or is this just the crest of one wave in a much larger ocean?
  
  
• How to prevent FPGA-based projects from going astray (Feb. 23, 2017)
  During the course of my career, I have been involved with developing a number of FPGA designs for some really interesting projects. Sadly, I have also been involved in rescuing several FPGA designs that have gone badly astray.
  
  
• Look Sharp: The IoT is Watching (Feb. 20, 2017)
  The Internet of Things (IoT) is about to change profoundly the design of embedded systems—but probably not in the way you are thinking. The change will begin not in silicon or in algorithms but in business models. Yet it will quickly permeate every aspect of embedded design.
  
  
• Using FPGAs in Mobile Heterogeneous Computing Architectures (Jan. 16, 2017)
  Since "context-aware" systems must be "always on" to track changes in the environment, these capabilities represent a potentially significant drain on system power.
  
  
• In Pursuit of Power (Jan. 09, 2017)
  It is no news that power design for modern systems is hard. The escalating demands of advanced chips—huge bursts of current, multidecade operating ranges, fast transients, and digital mode controls—have turned supplying power at the point-of-load (PoL) from an exercise in arithmetic into an adventure in high-bandwidth mixed-signal design.
  
  
• FPGA Development Tools Qualification for ISO26262 - An Overview and guideline (Dec. 12, 2016)
  In ISO 26262 ASIL compliant development process, Tool Confidence Level (TCL) or Tool Qualification is one of the vital activities and a requirement which cannot be compromised. The ISO 26262 standard Part 8: “Supporting Processes” (Clause 11) clearly emphasizes on TCL.
  
  
• Blockchains Unchained (Nov. 10, 2016)
  It first came to our attention as the plausible-sounding but obscure data structure that made Bitcoin unhackable. Then some people lost a lot of money in attacks on Bitcoin exchanges. But before the cyberspace version of yellow crime-scene tape could come down, blockchain was back.