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Rube Goldberg couldn’t have designed a more elegant confluence of convoluted causal relationships.  Start analyzing the perplexing paradox of the FPGA synthesis market and each link of the chain reveals a bizarre force vector that eventually doubles back onto itself into an unlikely equilibrium that miraculously has held stable for a full decade despite disruptive forces of epic proportions. For over a decade now, Synplify has navigated these waters and has continued to survive and thrive through the unlikeliest of conditions.  Now in the hands of EDA giant Synopsys, the Synplify family of FPGA synthesis tools continues to evolve - with a major upgrade this fall.  When you put a digital design into an FPGA, there are two technologies that determine whether your design fits or doesn’t fit, whether it meets your timing constraints or does not, whether the power consumption will be within your limits (or those of the FPGA), or whether it fails completely, leaving your project at the mercy of major mulligans.   Those two technologies are synthesis and place-and-route. 

With all of the new competition in the consumer robotics field, it’s about time for iRobot to show that they’re still capable of innovating new and exciting things. AVA, their technology demonstrator, definitely fits into the new and exciting category. AVA is short for ‘Avatar,’ although iRobot was careful not to call it a telepresence robot so as not to restrict perceptions of what it’s capable of. AVA is capable of fully autonomous navigation, relying on a Kinect-style depth sensing camera, laser rangefinders, inertial movement sensors, ultrasonic sensors, and (as a last resort) bump sensors. We got a run-down a few days ago at CES, check it out: