ANNOUNCEMENTS

CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES

Soft Core War
LatticeMico32 Opens the Field
Connecting the Camps
Mathworks Bridges System and Hardware Design
Embedded Data Management Grows Up
Encirq Accelerates Data-based Development
Spartan-3 Goes Golfing
Axcon Drives TrackMan Radar
System Design by Swarm
Natural Selection in Embedded Design
Ceramic Injection Molding Produces Complex Parts With Tight Tolerances
by Paul Manison, Morgan Advanced Ceramics
A Mile in Their Shoes
Altium’s Engineering Empathy

JOURNAL WEBCASTS

Soft Core War
LatticeMico32 Opens the Field

In another of their trademark one-two punch announcement flurries, Lattice Semiconductor paired up their low-cost SerDes announcement we covered last week [SEE ARTICLE] with an announcement of a new 32-bit RISC processor core that is compatible with their range of both high-performance and value-based FPGA families. The new offering takes a different tack from previous FPGA-based processors, with a completely open use model for a proprietary soft-core processor. Lattice’s strategy could help level the playing field in the odd array of offerings currently available to design teams creating FPGA-based systems-on-chip (SoCs).

Before FPGAs became viable system-on-chip platforms, there were two simple basic food groups in the embedded processor world: stand-alone processors for board- and module-level integration and processor IP cores for system-on-chip integration. Some of the most successful offerings today are processor architectures that managed to span both of those domains, such as ARM’s wildly successful architectures that have attained widespread adoption both as flexible IP cores in ASIC SoC implementations and in high-value, stand-alone chipsets for board-level integration. [more]