ISE 11.2 L.46 Looking Great

We've been having fun with beta versions of the backend tools from our FPGA vendors. Yesterday, ISE 11.2 L.46 went live, bringing V6/S6 builds into the non-NDA public eye. From our V5 ML555 viewpoint, things look great indeed.

OpenCPI Goes Live

We moved closer to our goal of providing a vendor- and substrate-agnostic application container as the OpenCPI website went live last week. Much more on this in the months ahead.

OpenCPI Development - Spring 2009

V6 Functional on ML605

We witnessed a demo of functional Xilinx V6 Silicon yesterday on their ML605 evaluation board. The Serdes was functional and operating at the 5 GHz needed for Gen2 PCIe. The two connectors on top are the VITA-57/FMC connectors.

ML-605 V6 Eval Board

FCCM 2009

FCCM 2009 was a worthwhile endeavor and success.

The Usual Suspects

Words Matter

Back in 2008 I read an awful, uninformed post on what I had thought to be a helpful and fair technology blog. I took the bait, and wrote a seven paragraph missive in response. Three months later, my response was posted; but it was severely diluted by the editor. While I'm glad my voice was heard, even as a squeak; my truths presented were castrated without any consent. The doc linked below is unedited:
Ref: S.Siegel, 2008-12-26, Letter to John Cooley

FPGA 2009

As Rodger Daltrey exclaims, "The Kids Are Alright". And so too was FPGA 2009. There is more promise than ever. And it really isn't that tough to do better than RTL!

Shep Explains Bluespec SystemVerilog

Don't Forget the Solder Wick

Our family has a nine year old CRT projector TV, one of the first consumer models that could scan 1080i. It lost red convergence a week ago, and I went a hunting for the fault. I was whining about yanking out the 18 pin power op amp that drives the red sub-coil yoke. Phil provided some motivation. Not just in his default "You are being a Wuss" cheer; but in the observation that there was little downside if I screwed up! That was all I needed to hear. An hour before kickoff, and we were good to go.

IC8C01