MORE ABOUT FPGA

This is a submission from Microchip on the RT PolarFire FPGA that is optimised to meet the most demanding requirements in spacecraft payload systems’ high-speed data paths with the lowest possible power consumption and heat generation.

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.

Xilinx has announced what it claims to be the world's largest FPGA device. With a total of 35 billion transistors, the VU19P offers the highest logic density and I/O number of any single device ever manufactured.

The new Arduino MKR VIDOR 4000 board is available in the Elektor Store. With an Intel 10CL016 FPGA. That’s 16 000 logic elements plus some specialised signal processing embedded multipliers (read: audio and video). The board, at 83 x 25 mm (3.3 x 1 inches) is as full as an egg. In addition to standard GPIOs, there are HDMI, USB, JST and MIPI (Camera) connectors. And let’s not forget the ARM ATSAMD21 32-bit microcontroller!

This is an article from Microchip on the new PolarFire™ FPGA imaging and video solution. It delivers capabilities superior to alternative technologies to support resolution as high as 4K in small, low-power form factors necessary for a wide variety of imaging and video applications.

What’s the fuss? ...Like we didn't have Arm technology in FPGAs for decades with the Cortex-A CPU based SoCs? Of course, but that’s the CPU integrated alongside FPGA fabric, rather than within the FPGA fabric. Arm-based FPGA SoCs have shipped in millions, and an example is the Xilinx Zync SoC family. The new development is that Arm DesignStart FPGA brings Cortex-M CPUs to the configurable FPGA fabric so that Arm CPUs are now available across all Xilinx FPGAs.

FPGA development remains a complicated job, but open source and open hardware tools like TinyFPGA manage to make it more accessible. Although still a long way from Arduino-style microcontroller development, they definitely bring FPGAs closer to the people. Let's have a look at the TinyFPGA BX board.

Who said that size doesn’t matter? It does. Many sexy applications prefer small boards, especially the long-endurance ones. The Arrow giveaway dev boards in this week’s selection are like that. Some of them sport an FPGA, others have ARM-core processors; they all let you express yourself the way you want on a small surface while consuming little power.

Gone are the days of tech companies focusing solely on their core product offerings. Today, chip makers are working on artificial intelligence projects, IP vendors are investing in IoT security research, and social media giants are looking into silicon design (and even FPGAs). We believe these are positive signs pointing to a healthy, evolving industry. Let’s review some of the most compelling electronics industry news stories from the past week.

In this video, developer Riemer Grootjans explains several powerful features of the SmartScope. Starting with the mobile use with a tablet, he then demonstrates I2C decoding using a multiple temperature sensor board connected to a laptop PC, hooked up to the Smartscope as a logic analyzer. Further SPI decoding is briefly showed too, as well as recorded data export and arbitrary wave generator (AWG).