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Actel Activates Platforms
Roadmap Solidifies Embedded Processor Strategy
Soft Processing and Customizable IP Enable Flexible, High Performance Embedded Design
by Jay Gould, Xilinx, Inc.
DRM To Go
Discretix Locks Down Handsets
Consumer Electronics Show 2007
Embedded Reporting from the Front Lines
Conspicuous Consumerism
CES Takes Over Vegas
Embedded '06
Platform Proliferation

Actel Activates Platforms
Roadmap Solidifies Embedded Processor Strategy

FPGA-based system-on-chip platforms are the etch-a-sketches of embedded design.  You can quickly sketch out your embedded computing system, use it, and easily erase and re-construct it in place as design changes are required.  Need a different peripheral?  No problem, just reprogram it.  Need to change a protocol – another simple hardware and software modification.  Want to use a different processor core – or an additional one?  Just drop it in and re-program the chip.  Your same board keeps right on working.

Actel is the alternative FPGA supplier.  On the FPGA vendor playground, their technology would be the ones with the punk hairdos, tattoos, and piercings, while the other FPGAs ran around in their matching crew-cuts, polo shirts, and jeans.  Actel has chosen non-volatile technologies such as flash and antifuse for thier FPGAs, compared with the industry standard SRAM-type implementation.  As a result, their FPGAs tend to be stingy with power, minimize the part count (as in – one), and have reasonable performance and density. [more]

Soft Processing and Customizable IP Enable Flexible, High Performance Embedded Design
by Jay Gould, Xilinx, Inc.

Which would you prefer for your next embedded project: flexible system elements so that you can easily customize your specific design, or extra performance headroom in case you need more horsepower in the development cycle? Why should embedded engineers put themselves under undue development pressure and settle for one or the other? Soft processing and customizable IP offer the best of both worlds, integrating the concepts of custom design and co-processing performance acceleration into embedded design.

Embedded engineers often struggle with the challenges of improving performance or changing system characteristics after they have already completed the general architecture partition. Discrete processors offer a fixed selection of peripherals and some kind of performance ceiling capped by clocking frequency. It’s common to change processors in next-generation projects because one needs another peripheral or a different one than was offered with the traditional fixed processor. [more]