Recent Blogs

Nice Achronix demo, but how fresh?

By Loring Wirbel September 2, 2010

At the beginning of the current week (Aug. 30), I took careful note of a brief item in Lightwave about an Achronix demonstration with Opticomp of a 120-Gbit/sec system, expandable to 160 Gbits/sec, based on multiple 40-Gbit channels.  It’s certainly nice to see the 9-FPGA Bridge100 board be put to such heavy lifting when the IEEE 802.3ba standards for 40- and 100-Gbit Ethernet are just gaining traction.  But then I noticed that the Bridge100 demo made its debut at the Advanced Microelectronics and Photonics for Space conference at Lake Tahoe in early June.

Stratix in UAVs

By Loring Wirbel August 31, 2010

Since UAVs are taking over a significant portion of the aerial war in Afghanistan (along with border monitoring and several other global tasks), FPGAs are a natural resident to high-end UAVs.  Over the last week, we’ve talked about FPGAs’ tasks in real-time signal processing, and the ability of certain FPGAs to move into more ruggedized applications means that they are displacing DSPs and integer processors in drones.

New concepts in DSP acceleration

By Loring Wirbel August 26, 2010

Earlier this week, I talked with Suhel Dhanani, senior DSP marketing director at Altera Corp., about the new tools Altera is bringing to device design as it moves its families to 28 nm process technologies.  While many of these concepts are used initially in the Stratix family of devices, they are moving rapidly to Cyclone FPGAs for more cost-effective implementations.

Paths to datapath optimizing

By Loring Wirbel August 24, 2010

Processors that were dedicated to direct real-time operations on data in a stream – such as packet analysis and forwarding in a communication channel – used to be either dedicated programmable devices (the ill-fated network processor), or ASSPs, such as TCP offload engines or security co-processors.

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News Spotlight

GateRocket Teams With AcconSys to Distribute Industry-Leading FPGA Verification and Debug Solutions in China

August 30, 2010

GateRocket, Inc., the leading supplier of verification and debug solutions for advanced FPGAs, has signed an agreement with AcconSys Inc., a major distributor of electronic design automation (EDA) products in China. AcconSys will provide sales and support for GateRocket's RocketDrive(R) and RocketVision(R) FPGA verification products throughout China.

Avnet, MathWorks and Texas Instruments Deliver Workshops on Integrating Xilinx FPGAs with High-Speed Data Converters

August 24, 2010

Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas (EMA), a business region of Avnet, Inc. along with MathWorks and Texas Instruments (TI) is offering a new series of workshops focusing on digital signal processing (DSP) system design using Xilinx FPGAs with high-speed data converters. These workshops are being offered to design engineers beginning September 21, 2010, and will be taking place in locations throughout North America.

FPGA board offers 37 million Asic gates for prototyping

August 19, 2010

An FPGA-based logic prototyping system that can emulate up to 37 million Asic gates at clock speeds up to 700MHz, is available from Dini Group. The US-based logic emulation platform firm has combined seven Xilinx, Virtex-6 FPGAs in the DN2076k10 board.

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