MORE ABOUT FPGA

It’s that time again – Elektor's July & August 2017 edition is now available for purchase! This issue is packed full of things to keep you entertained. You can get your printed copy posted direct to your door for free, with no shipping costs at all.

FPGA application design has never been easy and the fact that devices keep growing bigger and more powerful doesn’t help to improve the situation. More powerful devices result in more demanding applications which in return lead to even more powerful devices, an infernal loop (VICIEUZE CIRKEL). The engineers developing these increasingly complex applications do not have the time to study in detail the hardware that makes it all possible, and so, to help them out, hardware manufacturers provide high-level tools, libraries, stacks, IP blocks, and the like.

The engineers at Red Pitaya have updated and expanded their product line. All the boards are now called STEMlab, so the original Red Pitaya has been renamed STEMlab 125-14. It also has a little brother now, named STEMlab 125-10. We spent some time in the Elektor Labs playing with one of the first available prototypes of the STEMlab 125-10.

The SmartScope is an especially handy and affordable USB oscilloscope, logic analyzer and signal generator. Internally the SmartScope is built around a powerful Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA, which also makes it suitable for use as an FPGA development platform. Elektor is now offering the unique SmartScope Maker Kit, which includes a special version of the SmartScope and two programmers with suitable cables.

We had heard about Software Defined Radio (SDR), Networking (SDN) and Storage (SDS), but Software Defined Programming? Isn’t programming software-defined by definition? Apparently not, according to FPGA manufacturer Xilinx who recently introduced its SDSoC development environment and extended it just now with support for the Zynq Ultrascale+ MPSoC. Looking closer, Software Defined Programming seems to be a pretty exciting technology.

Many readers will be aware that I am not, unlike my colleagues here at Elektor, a trained engineer. I have certainly been surprised by many things since I started work here over ten years ago with Ernst Krempelsauer. One concept that’s always fascinated me is the seemingly limitless potential of FPGAs. Engineers can describe a system in software and with the click of a mouse button...

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta (USA) have developed a new configurable analog processor chip that uses only one-thousandth of the power of a comparable digital processor and is much smaller.

Red Pitaya is a powerful instrumentation and prototyping module used by numerous electronics professionals and hobbyists as a general-purpose oscilloscope, signal generator or signal analyzer. It is also suitable for user-developed applications. Red Pitaya is now offering a calibrated version of this versatile module as a limited edition, eliminating the need for calibration by the user.

Intel has announced that it has completed the acquisition of Altera, a provider of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. The acquisition complements Intel’s blah, blah, blah, yeah, yeah, we know. The interesting part of this press release is a bold claim about Moore's law.

Running on an entry-level FPGA, Project Oberon is a design for a complete desktop computer system from scratch. Its simplicity and clarity enables a single person to know and implement the entire system, while still providing enough power to make it useful and usable in a production environment.