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The FPGAs referenced in these articles have complex dedicated I/O circuitries that are primarily designed to support external memory interfaces. The ALTMEMPHY megafunction is designed to support the most common memory standards, such as the DDR and DDR 2 SDRAM and QDR II+/QDR II SRAM (in a burst length of 4) interfaces. The ALTMEMPHY megafunction should be used whenever possible as it is beneficial to use the IP and timing closure methodologies used with these FPGAs, which enables users not to have to create this function manually as compared with using the ALTDLL and ALTDQ_DQS solution. However, the ALTMEMPHY megafunction does not support other external memory standards such as Mobile DDR, QDR II+/QDR II SRAM (in burst length of 2) or customized DDR and DDR 2 SDRAM external memory standards. For these scenarios, use the ALTDLL and ALTDQ_DQS megafunctions to access the FPGA architecture and build a custom external memory interface.

FPGAs referenced in this article have complex dedicated I/O circuitries that are primarily designed to support EMIF. The ALTMEMPHY megafunction is designed to support the most common memory standards, such as the DDR , DDR2 SDRAM, and QDR II+/QDR II SRAM (in a burst length of 4) interfaces. Other external memory standards such as Mobile DDR, QDR II+/QDR II SRAM (in burst length of 2), or customized DDR and DDR 2 SDRAM external memory standards are not supported. Instead, the ALTDLL and ALTDQ_DQS megafunctions are used to access the FPGA architecture and build a custom EMIF.

The consumer handheld market is growing by leaps and bounds. With more processing power and increased support for more applications, portable products are cross-pollinating with traditional computing systems even as the product life cycle has decreased considerably in this market segment. As a result, especially in this era of economic slowdown, it is imperative that new products meet the time-to-market window to gain maximum acceptance. A decrease in product life cycles requires a reduced development cycle and an increased emphasis on reusability and reprogrammability. The emerging handheld market is also seeing interesting trends in which each individual device in a family has lower volumes but there is more customization across the series of devices, effectively upping the total unit volumes. The key challenge then becomes how to develop a system that is widely reusable and also customizable. These requirements have led designers increasingly to turn to the FPGA for handheld-product development. The FPGA has become more powerful and feature-rich, while gate counts, area and frequency have increased. FPGA development and turnaround cycles are considerably shorter than those of custom ASICs, and the added advantage of reprogrammability can make the FPGA a more compelling solution for handheld embedded systems.

Intel has announced that is developing a system-on-chip for embedded applications based around its Atom processor core. However, it appears the SoC will be of a fixed design with a PCI Express bus interface to which system-level customers can attach their own or third-party chips. Similarly it appears that Intel will manufacture the system-chip internally rather than allowing a foundry to make the chip, or add its customers' IP to the design. Doug Davis, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel's embedded and communications group, disclosed details of the "Tunnel Creek" SoC during his keynote speech on Wednesday (April 14) at the Intel Developer Forum, in Beijing China.

This article features an example chapter from a new *Hot-off-the-Press* book on FPGA Design that just recently hit the streets in August 2010. This chapter is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher – Springer. This book -- FPGA Design: Best Practices for Team-Based Design -- describes best practices for successful FPGA design. It is the result of the author’s meetings with hundreds of customers on the challenges facing each of their FPGA design teams. By gaining an understanding into their design environments, processes, what works and what does not work, key areas of concern in implementing system designs have been identified and a recommended design methodology to overcome these challenges has been developed.

Multisim 11 is the latest version of its circuit simulation software, with specialized editions for both hands-on learning and professional circuit design. The easy-to-use Multisim software delivers a graphical approach that abstracts the complexities of traditional circuit simulation, helping educators, students and engineers employ advanced circuit analysis technology. The academic edition of Multisim 11 incorporates specialized teaching features and is complemented by circuits textbooks and courseware. This integrated system helps educators engage students and reinforce circuit theory with an interactive, hands-on approach to investigating circuit behavior. Multisim 11 Professional helps engineers optimize circuit designs, minimize errors and reduce prototype iterations. When combined with the new NI Ultiboard 11 layout and routing software, Multisim provides engineers a cost-effective, end-to-end prototyping platform. Its integration with NI LabVIEW measurement software also helps engineers define custom analyses to improve design validation…

Supporting the Wind River Systems VxWorks operating system on Intel architecture is valuable for customers who would like to preserve their application software and evaluate other architectures for comparison purposes or for architecture conversion. Products from Wind River Systems, particularly VxWorks, offer a great opportunity to address multiple architectures with the same real-time operating system (RTOS). Furthermore, the continuous development and migration of multicore platforms has increased the focus on migrating software to multicore and performance optimizations given a specified software workload and certain hardware resources.

Having the lowest system power allows customers to achieve their design objectives, whether it be for longer battery life, higher product performance or lower system cost. The Si100x/1x wireless MCU family features the industry’s lowest active mode current consumption, which saves power when the application is running. It also has the industry’s lowest current consumption sleep modes that save power when the device is sleeping, which is typically the majority of time in most battery powered applications.

Breadboarding a new circuit is a key skill and an important step in many projects—especially early on, when you need to move wires around and substitute components. But that very flexibility also makes it easy to knock wires out. Eventually, if your project is a keeper, you’re going to want something with a bit more permanence. Printed circuit boards (PCBs) solve all those shortcomings. But most people don’t even consider translating a one-off project into a PCB design. For one thing, PCB fabrication has traditionally been expensive, viable only in commercial quantities. (One alternative is to do it yourself with etches and silk screens, a messy and time-consuming process.) Also, there are technical constraints involved with PCB designs that are daunting to the casual hobbyist. But it turns out that nowadays you can produce a professional PCB very inexpensively.

How's this for a wedge issue on a slow news week? When Xilinx announced earlier this year that it was changing one of its foundry suppliers from UMC to TSMC for the 28-nm node, it seemed like a blow to differentiation—at least from a process technology standpoint—between Xilinx and Altera, which has been using TSMC for years. But while Xilinx chose to go with TSMC's high-performance/low power process, Altera said this week it is going with TSMC's high-performance process. Altera maintains that customers in the high end communications equipment market are much more concerned about performance than power. Luanne Schirrmeister, senior director of product marketing at Altera, put it this way: "In communications infrastructure, nothing is battery powered. Everything is plugged into a wall."

FPGA devices create compelling business drivers generating a tidal wave of FPGA adoption for the implementation of system PCB designs. Obviously, the time to market advantages and capacity/performance characteristics of FPGA devices have delivered on the promise for a viable alternative to more capital resource intensive custom IC/ASIC solutions as well as a successful consolidation vehicle for standard "off the shelf" components in system design creation.