| Summer in the City | |
No, you Californians, by 'the City' I'm not referring to San Francisco ("The City" to you in the Bay Area) but Austin, where we're enduring endless weeks of 100+ degree weather that reminds me why I didn't move to Phoenix. On the plus side it's kept us inside and working, resulting in some upgrades to Low-Power Design.
Our extensive video coverage of June trade shows--including DAC, ESC Chicago, Sensors Expo, and TI Media Day--is now online in a nice format, accessible from the nav bar. Our bloggers now have their smiling faces on column one, including our newest contributor Brian Dipert, who's the most important upgrade. The Product and News scrollers are now 'above the fold' where you can't miss them. And we also have a backlog of design articles that we're starting to post, so please check back often as things get even hotter in July.
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| SiliconBlue Rolls Out 40-nm Low-Power FPGAs | |
To date winning a cell phone socket has been a bridge too far for FPGA vendors. Xilinx's CoolRunner CPLDs have been successful there by adding glue logic, but FPGAs have long been too bulky, expensive, and power hungry to get into anything smaller than a military manpack. Startup SiliconBlue intends to change that. SiliconBlue’s unique contribution is an SRAM-based FPGA fabric that, according to CEO Kapil Shankar, "can operate from a 1.0V core and consume 50% less static power and over 50% less dynamic power than 1.8V 'low-power' PLD alternatives." More |
| Will Compaan's HotSpot Parallelizer technology take us to the promised land of parallel computing? | |
Here's how it works. You start with application code written in C. You add pragmas around known code hotspots to switch on Compaan's HotSpot Parallelizer and to switch it off. You discover these hotspots using regular code-analysis techniques already used for other sorts of software-specific optimizations. So far, nothing new here. Then you submit the code to the Compaan HotSpot Parallelizer for analysis. The Parallelizer analyzes the code and creates a Kahn Process Network that consists of many independently executable processes and the communications linkages needed to pass data between these processes. What you then end up with is several independent C programs that can be compiled and run on one processor, run on several processors, run or on some mix of processors and hardware built using a C-to-hardware compiler. More |
| Travelling the Road of Natural Interfaces |  The forms for interfacing between humans and the machines are constantly evolving, and the creation rate of new forms for human-machine interfacing seems to be increasing. Long gone are the days of using punch cards and card reader to tell a computer what to do. Most contemporary users are unaware of what a command line prompt and optional argument is. Contemporary touch, gesture, stylus, and spoken language interfaces threaten to make the traditional hand shaped mouse a quaint and obsolete idea. More |
| Network Non-Neutrality: Designing Around Its Reality |  While network neutrality restrictions can come from bandwidth 'hard' caps and overage fees, as described above, their implementations also take many other forms. Network neutrality is a topic that I've closely followed for a number of years now. My point with today's writeup isn't to debate whether or not network neutrality makes sense. It's to offer, in acknowledging that network neutrality fetters are increasingly being put in place by wired and wireless broadband providers alike, some suggestions as to how you should appropriately respond from a feature set standpoint in your future Internet-accessing product designs.More |
| July Wireless Update: New LTE Handsets Take Different Modem Tacks |  There's no question that HTC's Thunderbolt LTE/CDMA handset for Verizon's LTE network has been a hit. That, of course, followed the Samsung Craft fielded on the MetroPCS network. The Thunderbolt employs two Qualcomm modems while the Craft employs an LTE modem from Samsung and a Qualcomm CDMA modem. Note that Verizon's LTE network is data-only, so CDMA is also required to handle voice (and 3G fallback, if properly implemented). The two latest Verizon LTE handsets employ different modem pairings. More |
| TechZone Magazine | |
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| Training Courses | |
 Fundamentals of Solar: Grid Connected
Photovoltaic (PV) solar technology is at the heart of the multi-billion dollar clean/green/renewable energy industry, powering everything from road signs to entire cities. This course covers the fundamentals of grid-connected PV systems, with the aim of providing engineers with a good overview of the technologies, topologies and electronics that make up such systems.
Fundamentals of Microcontrollers
EE Times Fundamentals course provides an introduction to microcontrollers (MCUs) including usage and selection of the devices. The course also includes a video explaining showing how to get started with an mbed evaluation kit. |
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