Loring Wirbel

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Stratix Strategy for Fifth Generation

Given Altera Corp .’s earlier statements regarding 28-nm processes and HardCopy architectures , the capabilities of Stratix V were known long before the April 19 launch of the family. Still, the justification for the 28-Gbit/sec transceivers and 1.6-Tbit/sec aggregate switching capability aims for a core transport application space that may be only a partial realization of the... More

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NATURE abhors a nano-vacuum

Kudos to Princeton University EE Professor Niraj Jha for taking third place in the university’s Innovation Forum, recognizing research with commercialization potential. The award was described in an April 14 news release from Princeton. JJha was the developer of NATURE , a CMOS/nanotube architecture for FPGAs, which he first described in a 2006 paper for the Design... More

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Parallel species search

A fascinating press release with little information showed up over the April 10 weekend, hinting at a new use of DSP-enhanced FPGAs in performing the Phylogenetic Likelihood Function, a method of determining the relationship of species in evolutionary studies. I’ve been able to figure out that this abstract describes a paper in BMC Bionformatics 2010, by Stephanie Zierke and... More

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Make Way for DDR3

Any thoughts that implementation of systems using  DDR3 SDRAM might be delayed by either OEMs or microprocessor developers were eliminated this week when a colleague, Gordon Kelly, reported for Smartbook Blog that Intel would support the new memory interface in its next-generation Atom. The speed of adoption of video in small platforms has accelerated the desire to support the... More

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Keeping QPACE with quantum chromodynamics

This blog has covered several instances in the past year of FPGAs used in scalable supercomputing (oops, “HPC,” seems as though the supercomputing label is all but obsolete). One startup with roots from Convex Computer, called Convey Computer Systems , even built its business plan around FPGAs. But the use of Xilinx’s Virtex-5 in a network-management role in... More