NIWeek: Xilinx honours team for LabView FPGA design

Xilinx has honoured the winner of the LabView FPGA Innovation Award at a ceremony during the NIWeek 2012, National Instruments' technology conference and exhibition in Austin, Texas.

The winning design team was selected by a judging panel of National Instruments and Xilinx represenattives to have the most innovative application using LabVIEW system design software to program the FPGA in NI hardware.

The Data Science Automation design team was recognized for its use of FPGA technology in a mission-critical oil and gas industry field application. 

"I'm proud to honor this year's LabVIEW FPGA award recipients from Data Science Automation for exemplifying the tremendous performance, flexibility and freedom afforded by FPGAs for tackling complex engineering challenges to address practical applications that impact our everyday lives," said Xilinx vice president for processing platforms, Larry Getman.
The company's "Developing a Hydraulic Fracturing Pump Controller" paper describes a new real-time system with built-in operator safety procedures for monitoring and controlling a hydraulic oil well fracturing pump under hazardous environmental conditions in which pressures can exceed 15,000 pounds per square inch at an injection rate of more than 10 barrels per minute.
Using LabVIEW to program the FPGA in CompactRIO, the engineering team built an affordable system that met stringent performance, price and time-to-market requirements. The system not only controls the hydraulic fracturing pump for operator and equipment safety, but carefully monitors surrounding conditions to ensure environmental safety and protection on the job site. 
FPGA technology in the CompactRIO enables high-channel density, high-speed processing and automated control.  

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Microchip signs global deal with Arrow

Microchip Technology has signed a global distribution deal with Arrow Electronics.
This global agreement includes Microchip’s complete line of 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit PIC microcontrollers, analogue and interface semiconductors, wireless solutions, and memory devices, along with related development tools.

Arrow is also a principal distributor for Standard Microsystems Corporation (SMSC) that was recently acquired by Microchip.
“This is a strong addition to our global linecard,” said Jeff Eastman, Arrow's senior v-p of global supplier marketing and asset management.

“Microchip’s resources aid in almost every aspect of a customer’s design, from concept to production,” said Eastman.
“Arrow is already franchised with SMSC products,” said Mitch Little, Microchip’s v-p of worldwide sales and applications. “This partnership is an important part of our ongoing efforts to make it easier for customers to create successful end products.”
Microchip completed the $900m acquisition of  SMSC earlier this month.
“We believe SMSC’s smart mixed-signal connectivity solutions aimed at embedded applications are an ideal complement to Microchip’s embedded control business,” said Steve Sanghi, Microchip’s president and CEO.

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Discordant bits and single photons boost quantum power

Exploiting the weirdness inherent in the quantum world to create new technologies just got a little easier, thanks to two breakthroughs. One suggests that an untapped quantum phenomenon previously dismissed as mere "noise" could give quantum computers a boost. The second harnesses objects known as quantum dots, used previously in brain science and computing, to make quantum code-sharing more secure.
The quantum world, with particles that can be in multiple places at once, is known for its strange properties. Perhaps the most famous example is entanglement, which inextricably links particles no matter how far apart they are in space.
Most quantum computers exploit entanglement: the idea is that some problems could be run much faster on a computer that has entangled quantum bits, or qubits, instead of ordinary ones. But entanglement has proved difficult to tame, especially outside the lab.
Now Mile Gu of the Centre for Quantum Technologies at National University of Singapore and colleagues have shown that a property called quantum discord might replace it in quantum computing.
Quantum discord is a type of interference and was previously dismissed as unhelpful noise. But when Gu's team used the phenomenon to encode information into laser light, they found that this increased the amount of original information that they could retrieve afterwards. Their experiment doesn't count as a quantum computation, but it hints at a new way of doing quantum computing that is free of pesky entanglement. Gu told PhysOrg:
"Our research has identified that quantum discord, a more robust and easy-to-access phenomenon than entanglement, can also deliver quantum advantage."
Computing isn't the only potential application of quantum weirdness. Sven Hoefling and colleagues at the University of Würzburg in Germany have found a way to increase the security of quantum key distribution, in which a secret key that can subsequently be used to encrypt a message is transmitted via single photons.
QKD is secure because once a quantum object, such as a single photon, has been observed, it is irrevocably changed. So if the key is intercepted by an eavesdropper, the receiver would know about it.
The trouble is that producing just one photon is not easy. Until now most QKD experiments have been performed by winnowing down streams of photons emitted by lasers. But there is always a chance that an extra photon has slipped through, in which case the key might be intercepted without the receiver's knowledge.
Hoefling and colleagues instead transmitted a key using photons produced by quantum dots, nanoparticles capable of producing single photons without the need for a filter.
Quantum dots, also touted for their potential to form computer memories, and more recently to activate brain cells, have the advantage of being made from semiconductors, which may make them easier to convert into a commercial technology. As Hoefling told the BBC:
"Semiconductors are at the heart of all the technology we use. You can really benefit from that, because you don't need to make a whole new chain of technology."

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NIWeek: First RF vector signal transceiver unveiled

National Instruments has unveiled at NIWeek in Austin, its first RF vector signal transceiver on the PXI virtual instrumentation bus.
The PXIe-5644R RF vector signal transceiver is a software-designed instrument which combines a vector signal generator and vector signal analyser with a user-programmable FPGA into a single PXI modular instrument.
As a result engineers can use the LabView design system to optimise the FPGA-based hardware for specific mobile and other wireless applications.
“When we first started our company, we envisioned the central role software would play in instrumentation, and now we are truly seeing LabVIEW revolutionize the way engineers approach RF design and test,”  said Dr. James Truchard, president, CEO and cofounder of National Instruments.
The instrument covers up to 6.0GHz and has an 80MHz instantaneous RF bandwidth. This makes the transciever suitable for wireless standards such as 802.11ac and LTE.
It can be expanded to support multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) configurations or parallel testing in a single PXI chassis.

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Smartphones drive strong mobile DRAM sales

Due to growing smartphones and tablet sales, mobile DRAM is set to hit a record $6.56bn in revenues this year, up 10% from 2011, according to an IHS iSuppli Mobile & Embedded Memory Market Brief.
Mobile DRAM density in smartphones increased from 2.28Gbit to 5.85Gbit in the last two years.

The expansion is even greater in tablets, with the mobile DRAM average density soaring fourfold during the same period from to 8.33Gbit.
Mobile DDR DRAM chips differ from standard DRAM with power-saving features including lower operating voltage and optimised refresh rates.
“The mobile DRAM segment is achieving impressive growth as mobile operating systems, streaming apps and games require more memory to handle sophisticated tasks,” said Ryan Chien, analyst for memory & storage at IHS.

“Crucial features like multitasking, media decoding and decompression, data synchronization and background operations are all driving DRAM needs—and new phones and tablets are meeting those needs with their rise in mobile DRAM densities,” said Chien.

The standard DRAM market grew by 3% over the same period.
Owing to the lagging sales of PC computing behind handsets and tablets, revenue growth for standard DRAM this year is anticipated to be weak.

While mobile DRAM average selling prices have been falling over time in line with the overall memory space, prices remain relatively firm for mobile DRAM chips because of a number of factors, including high demand, a smaller supply base and healthy density growth.

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Xilinx pushes Zynq-7000 to 1GHz on TSMC 28nm process

Xilinx says it has increased the top processing performance spec of its Zynq-7000 programmable SoC devices to 1GHz.

This is a 25% increase over initial specifications for the two largest Zynq-7000 devices.
Target applications are likely to be in high-end image and graphic processing applications within the medical, aerospace and defence markets.
“A significant factor behind our ability to take the Zynq-7000 family to 1GHz is Xilinx’s choice of TSMC’s 28nm HPL process, which we are using for our entire 28nm generation to bring the value of low-power with high-performance to customers,” said Vidya Rajagopalan, Xilinx’s vice president of processing solutions.
Based around an ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 MPCore processing system, the Zynq-7045 device is the largest member of Xilinx’s family of All Programmable SoCs with more than 5 million equivalent Asic gates (350k logic cells), sixteen 12.5Gbit/s serial transceivers and 1334 GMACS of peak DSP performance.

The Zynq-7045 devices pushes programmable systems integration a step further by providing a hard PCIe Gen2 x8 block, (PCIe x8 Gen3 can be implemented using a soft core in the programmable logic), with high performance SelectIO technology supporting up to 1866Mbit/s for additional DDR3 memory interfaces and 1.6Gbit/s for LVDS interfaces in DDR mode.
Zynq-7010 devices are also available in the CLG225 package measuring 13 x 13mm.
Zynq-7045 devices are currently shipping to select Early Access customers. Broader availability will begin next quarter. 

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Toshiba will start volume production of a 3Tbyte HDD this month.

The 3.5 inch drive is aimed at consumer products. It complies with the EU RoHS directives.
There are variations: one for desktop PCs; one for digital video; one for low power consumption applications.
High-speed data transfers are secured by adoption of SATA I/F capable of a 6Gb/s transfer rate.

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