At an industry event last Friday (Oct 14th 2011), we had the chance to present a talk on, “What Can FPGA Designers Do With Personal Data Centers?” and demonstrate our new cloud-based approach to achieving timing closure for an FPGA design. Opening Mike Holt, Vice-President of the Singapore Semiconductor Industry Association, opened the event with […]
Security has long been one of the first and most pressing questions for the cloud. Users and business owners are naturally wary about placing sensitive data in the hands of a 3rd-party. This is especially true for the semiconductor chip design industry, and rightly so. However, one point which is gaining acceptance is that if […]
Came across an article on EDN that talks about software piracy in EDA land.Apparently 30% to 40% of all EDA software use is via pirated licenses.Imagine what this means in terms of lost revenue to EDA vendors, and to endusers, it might be argued that a rival design team is spending far less on far more […]
Came across an interesting discussion on FPGAs and parallelism on LinkedIn: The original poster, Karl Stevens, starts off by asking, In the context of an FPGA, parallelism is an important item. Which kinds of parallelism apply and how much performance is gained? Compared to what?Most kinds of parallelism apply to cpu’s. FPGAs can do register […]
We are glad to announce significant upgrades to our cloud management platform! Although the frontend online interface looks almost the same, the backend has become a much stronger beast. Essentially we restructured the code to make the platform even more scalable and configurable. Inspired by the recent spate of hacking activities, we also added a […]
A few days ago, Synopsys announced that they are preparing for their tools to make use of cloud computing. Which was a little strange considering comments to the contrary from both Cadence and Synopsys just a couple of months earlier.”Synopsys Chairman and CEO Aart de Geus told an audience at the company’s SNUG San Jose users’ […]
Many hardware designers whom we spoke with, including investors, students, engineers, regardless of whether they work with ASICs or FPGAs, associate cloud computing with utility or cheap computing power. Instead of spending half a million dollars on servers, networking equipment and maintenance, one can simply use a “rental cloud”. While the benefits are commonly touted, in […]
I recently had the pleasure of hearing Aaron Patzer of Mint.com speak at a Founder’s Institute event. It was about how Mint was found and their early challenges.One of the challenges he faced was similar to what we face at Plunify – security and trust Mint.com helps you manage personal finances. Their interactive, user-friendly software […]
(Reproduced from eefocus.com)Some tips on FPGA design found online, apparently contributed by an experienced designer.Thought it made some good points with respect to general ways to approach the process.很多人在学习FPGA设计，这里转载一个老鸟的博文，谈谈FPGA设计的17个小贴士。 1、状态机的问题，尽量不要写出太大的状态机，宁愿用一些小型的状态机来相互关联。 2、推荐大家使用timequest来做时序约束，好处是，它可能对你的时序约束和你的设计对照做分析，在做时序分析之前，先对你的约束做分析，然后告诉你，你有多少该做的事情而没有做的（为被约束的路径）还有多少你要求做的，而没有被做的（被忽略的时序要求）。 3、对时钟的约束，要重点关注两个现象。首先是尽量少的在时钟路径上引入逻辑，否则可能造成了时钟和时钟之间的skew。另外就是一种上下沿都需要用来采集数据的时钟。对于时钟的约束有很多的地方需要注意，否则你的电路都不知道会飞到哪里去。 4、约束中最重要的一个关键，不要过约束。过约束的坏处一大堆，增加编译时间，资源使用过度，导致其他的时序问题。如果你对自己的约束有些不太放心，又或者说可能器件和器件之间会有很细微的差别，你可以给约束做一些余量，但是过约束是万万要不得的。 5、 IP的作用就是为了完成一个特定的功能，所以我们并不需要知道它是如何实现的。作为一个IP，最重要的，其实是接口，因为你最重要的是需要知道是怎么让它 工作起来，而不是它怎么工作的。所以在看文档的时候，最主要看的就是接口信号，对所有的信号的作用有一个了解。例如，NiosII CPU作为一个比较大型的模块，使用的是Avalon MM 点对点接口，它与普通的PCI接口不同的地方是，他可以支持同时多线控制。因为它没有总线的概念，不会在总线被占据的时候，其他任何通讯都无法进行。 NiosII是在SOPC builder 中被直接使用的，我们不需要知道具体有哪些信号，因为没有非常需要，我们是看不到这些接口的。在NiosII中，我们有两个Master Avalon MM 接口，一个是Instruction Master Port, 这是CPU用来读取指令的接口。CPU通过这个端口从Memory上读取指令。另一个是Data master port, 很简单，这是用来连接数据通道的。比如说你要读取的数据，你要存储的数据，都是走这个通道。这两个端口可以连接同一个内存，在这种时候需要特别小心，很有 可能自己把自己的指令给改掉了。但是反过来思考一下，其实我们可以做什么？可以按照状况改变软件代码。NiosII中还有第三个端口，这是用来做 Debug用的端口。还有其他的一些接口，比如TCM接口。我们需要知道这些接口的存在，但是不需要知道细节，只有在用到的时候再去看相关的文档就好了。 6、作为系统设计，是需要有一种粗旷型的大气魄，不需要在细节上浪费时间。你会发现很多的细节是没有意义的。并不是说我们不需要去研究细节，细节是很重要的，但是细节需要在被用到的时候才去关注就好了。 7、在使用IP的时候，会遭遇到意想不到的痛苦的。所以，尽量不要依靠假设来臆想了模块的设置。而是尽量的适应环境，来配置自己的设计。作为一个FPGA的玩家，这种依照环境来改变的能力是必须的。 […]