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Articles from
August 2008
| PolyCore Tools Designed to Ease Multicore Communications |
By BDTI, 8/20/2008
 As computational requirements go up and fab processes increasingly bump up against inconvenient physical limitations, multicore solutions are becoming more attractive. The problem is that no one wants to program them, because there are lots of challenges associated with implementing applications on multiple cores. One challenge lies in handling inter-core communications.
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| National Instruments Introduces Single-Board RIO |
By BDTI, 8/20/2008
 At NI Week in August, National Instruments introduced a new product line, a set of eight boards that are intended as complete, off-the-shelf computing-plus-I/O solutions for medical, mechatronic, and industrial applications, among others. The boards are called “Single-Board RIOs” (RIO is short for “reconfigurable I/O”), and each board contains a PowerPC CPU, a Xilinx Spartan FPGA, and analog and digital I/O. The I/O channels are connected to the FPGA, enabling the user to customize timing and I/O signal processing.
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| Case Study: “Your Mileage May Vary:” Creating Reliable Comparisons of IP Cores |
By BDTI, 8/20/2008
An attractive attribute of licensable processor cores is the flexibility chip designers have to adapt these cores to their chosen fabrication process, cell library, tool flow, logic synthesis goals and other conditions. In other words, chip designers can tune the core to the needs of a particular application and to their preferred chip design methodology. An unfortunate side effect of this flexibility is that it can be extremely difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons between licensable cores.
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| Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—Power Nomads |
By Jeff Bier, 8/20/2008
You see them at trade shows, in seminars, in airports—sometimes even in your own office building. They pace a room’s perimeter and scan its walls, eyes perpetually roving from floor to midline. They sneak behind counters and crawl under tables and thrust their hands into dark and cobwebby corners. Who are these people? And what do they want?
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