Monday, November 22, 2010

Consolidation of EDA Companies


Silicon Valley Blog

Mentor Acquires Magma?

Silicon Valley Blog - Daniel Nenni
Nov. 21, 2010

“I believe that within five years only two EDA companies will survive,” said Magma Design Automation Rajeev Madhavan (Silicom Ventures LLC international summit June 2008) “We will therefore be one of these two big companies, or we will have been bought by one of them,” he added.”

...

Madhavan concluded, “In a few years, hardware groups will be much smaller than software groups. We’ll see software becoming easier to work with and more involved in the hardware side. Software and chip design from the hardware side will be one unit and not separate ones.”

Click here to read more ...

Monday, November 15, 2010

Synplify FPGA Synthesis 2010.9 and Virtex-7

The Synplify FPGA Synthesis 2010.9 release still does not support Xilinx Virtex-7. It was claimed that multi-core current processing is support to enhance 4x performance over one processor. Incremental synthesis quality is also improved with new global placer. New team-design features for hierarchical project management and concurrent development. Design blocks, or previously verified design IP, can be created and shared internally. The full suite of datapath and building block components within DesignWare Library is supported for Synthesis Premier version.

However, it seems there were some bugs. Few days ago a new patch release was made again.


EMC to Acquire Isilon for $2.25 Billion to Gain Video Storage

I am not sure if Isilon products are FPGA based. Its competitor BlueArc network attached storage heavily rely on FPGA. "The FPGA's provide hardware acceleration of processing which typically occurs in software running on general purpose CPU's on competing products. As a result, BlueArc is able to provide high performance for a single system or node. Another feature of BlueArc's products is their ability to be clustered together into groups of up to 8 nodes", according to BlueArc wiki. FPGA greatly helps ideas of Storage-on-Chip.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Intel and Achronix

It seems Intel will not buy Xilinx and Altera since Intel lends support to a start-up Achronix. The deal announced on Nov. 1 would not only help the company bring 22-nm FPGAs to market faster than programmable logic market leaders Xilinx Inc. and Altera Corp., but also give the startup a leg up in 15-nm and future technology nodes.

Executives from Achronix (San Jose, Calif.) said the deal Achronix says the deal with Intel will allow its chips to have 300 percent better performance, 50 percent lower power, and 40 percent lower cost than its previous generation of products. Achronix’s Speedster chips are used in high-speed networking, broadband communications, encryption, high-performance computing, video and imaging, and military and aerospace.

Based on Intel’s world class 22nm process technology, the Speedster22i Platform forms the basis of the latest Achronix FPGA families.

Speedster22i FPGAs have significant advantages over larger geometry 28nm FPGAs. By combining Intel’s 22nm process and the innovative Achronix FPGA technology, Speedster22i FPGAs will yield up to 300% higher performance, 50% less power and 40% lower cost than FPGAs built on less advanced, 28nm processes.

Intel's 22nm process technology yield both performance and density benefits for Achronix FPGAs. The Speedster22i platform will address both of these areas, with up to 1.5GHz performance and devices as large as 2.5Million LUTs.

Area has a squared relationship with linear dimension, meaning 28nm circuits are approximately 1.6 times larger than 22nm circuits. This results in Speedster22i FPGAs having significantly lower power and higher density than FPGAs built in 28nm technology.

The Achronix Speedster22i FPGA Platform uniquely enables applications that require an end-to-end supply chain within the United States. Being built at an onshore location offers significant advantages to programmable logic users who demand the highest level of security. Additionally, Speedster22i FPGAs benefit from the high device reliability inherent to the Intel supply chain.  


Friday, November 5, 2010

HD Video Test Clips and Scaling

It seems the previous download sites for HD I mentioned are not available. Now HighDef forum provides some test clips at

http://www.highdefforum.com/high-definition-movies-video-clips/6537-official-hd-video-clip-list.html

Media College also provides some free 720p and 1080i clips:


We still can use the video format conversions in


The latest ffmpeg binary can be downloaded at


For video scaling, a command likes

ffmpeg -vf "scale=640:480" -pix_fmt yuv420p -s 480x272 -i 480x272.yuv -pix_fmt yuv420p 640x480.yuv


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