Blog
Chip Hack: FPGA programming for beginners
Powerful FPGA development boards are now easily within the price range of the hobbyist. The Terasic DE0-Nano is around £65/$100, yet capable of running a complete Linux-capable SoC. Last weekend, to coincide with Hardware Freedom Day, a group of us ran a hands-on workshop, Chip Hack, to introduce complete beginners to FPGA development
Read moreThe Square Kilometre Array: Driving Computing Innovation
Big science is important, not just because the questions it asks define what it is to be human, but because experiments of such magnitude have the potential to change all the fields of science around them
Read moreCompiler Optimisations for Energy Efficiency – Part 1
Over summer Embecosm funded a research project with the University of Bristol, into how compiler optimisations affect the energy consumption of applications. That project is now complete and the benchmarks and academic paper are available for download. In this blog post I will introduce the main aims of the project and only talk about the high […]
Read moreCommunity Access Parallella Prototype
Embecosm received both 16 and 64-core Parallella prototypes as part of their Kickstarter reward package and have decided to make the 16-core board available for use by the community. Requests for network access are now invited
Read moreAn introduction to FPGA Programming
There have been a number of talks at OSHUG meetings on FPGA technology and projects where it has been put to impressive uses such as software-defined radio and video synthesis. Each time generating much interest from members of the group from who are keen to experiment with FPGAs, but that also find the prospect of HDL programming and FPGA workflows daunting
Read moreA license to build
Not often do you listen to a lawyer speaking and wish he had talked for longer. But then Andrew Katz is no ordinary lawyer. He’s an open source IP specialist, and recently he’s been turning his skills to hardware licensing, notably with the SolderPad and CERN Open Hardware Licenses…
Read moreMigrating from CVS to Git
Today’s software development, both in open and closed source projects, is carried out between groups of developers who may not necessarily be in the same building, city or even country, but there is a need for these teams to work on a single up-to-date version of the projects code …
Read moreKickstarting chip design: The Raspberry Pi effect
On 27th October 2012 Adapteva Inc successfully raised almost $900,000 via the Kickstarter crowd funding website. It’s not the largest amount ever raised on Kickstarter, nor is it the most over-subscribed offering. What makes it unusual is being the first such funding success by a chip design company …
Read moreWho ate my battery?
The Ericsson T95 launched in 2001. It had a 720 mAh Li-Ion battery, a standby time of 300 hours and a talk time of 11 hours. A decade later the Sony-Ericsson Xperia X10 mini was launched. It has a 910 mAh Li-polymer battery, and using 3G, a standby time of approximately 285 hours and a talk time of approximately 3.5 hours with 3G …
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