FROM
THE EDITOR
This week, we drop in down under to see how Altium is doing a rare thing in design tool development - using their own products. Altium has always marched to a different drummer in the EDA industry - a drummer that tells them to make affordable, desktop, end-to-end electronic design software that can take you through all aspects of system development from FPGA and board design through embedded software implementation. This time, they proved their point by using their own software tools to create the accompanying development board - and improved the product in the process.
Our second new feature is a contributed article from Milan Saini of Xilinx on the adoption of ESL methods to create custom hardware using high-level languages and a surprisingly software-like approach. The combination of embedded processors and programmable hardware creates the potential for a blurring of the lines between software and hardware, offering a new flexibility never before seen in the embedded system design process.
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Kevin
Morris – Editor
Embedded Technology Journal
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ANNOUNCEMENTS
Comparison and Mapping of Data Distribution Service (DDS) and JAVA Message Service (JMS)
Data-centric design is emerging as the key to data-critical distributed embedded and enterprise systems. DDS and JMS are the most popular middleware API standards for embedded and enterprise systems. They both offer easy-to-use publish-subscribe communications, resulting in scalable distributed applications.
How do JMS and DDS compare? How do they differ? Can they be used together effectively? For the answers to these questions and more...
 Download the free whitepaper here.
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Free Whitepaper - The Changing Face of Re-usable IP
Embracing new technologies and understanding of IP, and under-standing how IP will be used by designers who are under severe pressure to create working designs in the shortest possible time will be the key to creating an environment where prefabricated IP underpins the majority of new designs. This article addresses key challenges in creating and deploying IP.
 Request the paper.
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Nallatech – The World Leader in FPGA Computing Solutions is recruiting now.
Nallatech is the world’s leading supplier of high-performance COTS FPGA Solutions. Nallatech designs and manufactures high-performance FPGA embedded products for the Defense and Security Market. We are currently recruiting Hardware Engineers in our UK locations.
 Take that big step to success with Nallatech.
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FPGA AND STRUCTURED ASIC JOURNAL
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JOURNAL WEBCASTS
UPCOMING:
"Optimizing Verilog Coding for More Efficient FPGA Synthesis" sponsored by Lattice Semiconductor
Date: Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Time: 11 a.m. Pacific / 2 p.m. Eastern
 Click to register
ON DEMAND:
"Designing 2Gbps Parallel I/O with the LatticeSC FPGA" sponsored by Lattice Semiconductor
 Click here to watch!
Lattice's new 90nm LatticeSC family--general introduction, sponsored by Lattice Semiconductor.
 Click here to watch! |
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A Mile in Their Shoes
Altium’s Engineering Empathy
Much of Nick Martin's day is like the typical workday of any large company CEO. Nick attends meetings, talks with the press and analysts about the company's products and performance, works to drive corporate and product strategy, and even stops to eat occasionally. Where Nick's path diverges sharply from the norm is that you just might also find him sitting in front of a multi-monitor machine running Altium Designer (the company's flagship, end-to-end electronic design software package), trying to finish up the last details of a board he's designing. This is not just some canned, pre-scripted demonstration to prove that the CEO is in touch with technology. This is an actual board design that Altium plans to sell in production – the NanoBoard-NB2.
At some level, the business of running any big international corporation is largely the same. In high technology, however, the mundanity of macromanaging a large organization often insulates executives from the actual technology challenges faced by both their customers and their own engineers. At Altium, they do things a little differently. Nick is an electronics engineer at heart, and his company provides design automation software aimed at helping the average working engineer get his job done better and faster. In order to accomplish that goal, Nick feels that everyone working to deliver that capability, himself included, needs to walk a mile in the shoes of the engineer using their products. That is why, when the company needed a new development board to go with the latest version of Altium Designer, they chose to do the design themselves, using their own software. [more]
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ESL for FPGAs
Tools Make FPGA Design an Exercise in
Software Programming
by Milan Saini, Xilinx Inc.
A fundamental
change is taking place in the world of logic
design. A new generation of design tools is
empowering designers to take their algorithmic
expressions straight into hardware without
having to learn traditional hardware design
techniques. These tools and associated design
methodologies are classified collectively as
electronic system level (ESL) design. A
generally accepted characterization of ESL is
that it refers to tools that enable the design
process to begin at a higher level of
abstraction than the current mainstream
register transfer level (RTL). ESL design
languages, also referred to as High Level
Languages (HLLs), are closer in syntax and
semantics to the popular ANSI C than to
hardware languages like Verilog and VHDL.
Xilinx defines the ESL for FPGA platform as the
collection of ESL design methodologies that are
specifically optimized for an FPGA platform.
[more]
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