More FPGAs on Mars

The Phoenix Mars lander is scheduled to be on the surface of Mars this weekend, on Sunday. At least one Actel FPGA is on board, handling pressure and temperature data processing.
Note that Actel and Xilinx FPGAs are already rolling around on Mars, in the Spirit and Opportunity rovers.
Details of the Phoenix lander and its gadgets [...]

FPGA and DSP Co-Design

Our pals at 3L put together a nice demonstration using a Sundance DSP/FPGA development board. Check it out:
DSP/FPGA Co-Processing Demonstrates 20X Acceleration using Software-to-Hardware Design Flow

Altera announces 40nm Stratix IV

Gee, it seems like just yesterday that 90nm process was a big deal…
Altera announces 40-nm Stratix IV FPGAs and HardCopy IV ASICs

Slaughterhouse Virtex-5?

FPGAs are appearing in some, ah, interesting places. Read about Automated Meat Processing in Vision Systems Magazine.

Embedded 3-D machine-vision system guides robotic cutting of beef carcasses
The stereo vision system used in this industrial-sized nail clipper is pretty cool. The manufacturer describes it this way:
TYZX’ DeepSea G2 Stereo Vision System is a small embedded camera with [...]

Floating-point performance in FPGAs

Dave Strenski of Cray and Jim Simkins, Richard Walke and Ralph Wittig from Xilinx have published an updated version of Strenski’s earlier article on floating-point performance in FPGAs.
Strenski’s analysis indicates that the biggest, baddest Xilinx FPGAs today (for floating point that would be the new Virtex-5 SX240T) have significantly higher peak performance than the [...]

Data centers and Green IT

Here’s a reconfigurable computing blog of note I just came across. Check out this posting by Amir Hirsh about server power management: Datacenter Power Management: Subverting the Dominant Paradigm.
Last month I attended the Washington Technology Summit where power efficiency and alternative energy were big topics (along with life sciences and advanced materials). During a panel [...]

Xilinx ML507 board: “Sweet!”

Ed is in geek heaven with his new ML507 board from Xilinx. This is a board designed to be a development and prototyping vehicle for all kinds of embedded applications. It’s got a PCI Express interface, video inputs and outputs, audio, network interface, all kinds of connectors. Too big to re-install the computer’s cover after [...]