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FPGA Product Companies - Exhaustive List [2020]

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Hi All , Lets take a deep look on current list of FPGA Product companies available across globe (year 2020).  The list is not compiled on any particular.Its purely based on popularity and available references from my memory. Generely speaking the FPGA industry is in continues growth (rough 5 Billion USD in 2018 and expected to reach 13 Billion USD by 2026). 1. XILINX -   https://www.xilinx.com/     The flagship bearer , industry leader for last 20 years , with widest portfolio of FPGA , SoC devices.     Major Portfolio :  Virtex , Zynq , RFSoC , Versal AI      Tool Name         :  Vivado - Synthesis, PnR , Programming Tool                                   Vitis  - Software Development Tool for Processor/ AI Integration 2. INTEL FPGA (Altera) -   https://www.intel.in/content/www/in/en/products/programmable.html     Previously known as Altera, currently part of Intel , main competitor for Xilinx.     Major Portfolio  :  Agilex , Arria 10 SoC , Xeon-FPGA hybrid      Tool Name         : Q
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Introducing an FPGA-ARM Dev Kit for Embedded Linux Starters- Avent MiniZED Board

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Hi All ,  Welcome to another tech byte.... Embedded Linux is a very powerful area in the current age of IoT  and Edge Computing. But as an FPGA RTL person throughout the career , i had  numerous situations where had to work side by side with embedded software engineers who were  linux gurus. I have seen their struggle starting from setting up environment for development, building code , solving hardware dependencies , integrating software pieces for limited resources , cross compiling , optimising for performance so and so... Rather than few sneek peaks into their works, i have never dared myself to do a hands on into these linux stuffs.. I was pretty happy with few diagnositc linux commands which told me , yes data to and from my FPGA side is pretty solid and running.. And we had run into situations where we play "ball in your court" game  when a bug pops up from nowhere.. We blame it on software and they shout it back on RTL  :) But last project at workplace with a
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DIY Fixing a Laptop Battery

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Hi Friends ,  DIY is always fun and awesome, and so welcome to another word of tech byte... This note is a collective scratchpad of troubleshoot methods and fixes i came across recently for fixing my laptop battery that went bad. Battery Model   : HP HS04  battery pack (4 cell , lithium ion, 14.6V , 2670 mAh, 41 Wh) Laptop  Model  : HP 15-ac635tu   (equivalent to HP G4 250 Notebook) The Symptoms Laptop Showed 1. Laptop charger goes on and off intermittently after charging up to more than 60% . The charger port LED goes between charging and not-charging frequently. 2. Once laptop is running from battery, charge percentage drops faster than normal, and once it reaches 23% , laptop shuts off immediately. On power in on again the charge percentage will be less than 15% and wont complete bootup to desktop. Faints instantly. Troubleshooting 1. Borrowed a laptop charger from my friend and tried 2 or 3 charge cycles. But still the issue     persisted.     This confirmed that
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Upgrading Laptop Wifi to Dual Band

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A short note for people trying to upgrade  an old laptop Wifi /Bluetooth module and Antenna Hi... Welcome to another tech byte.. So , you are at the right place to read further , if you looking forward with below reasons.. 1. You have an old laptop, which doesn't support new 5Ghz WiFi band , and pretty old Bluetooth version.(v4.0 or below) 2. You have a shitty old Realtek Wifi/BT Hardware , which dosen't have an updated Win 10 driver 3. You are living with a laptop which is shy to walk away from your home WiFi router.You just found out that your laptop only has a single patch antenna and suffers from serious signal strength issues. Ok then..Now what to look for...? What to understand...? What to understand before shopping new hardware.. 1. Digg out the detailed manual of your laptop model . Its is  quite handy for doubts. 2. Understand the connector type of the wifi/bt hardware module to laptop main board(open up  laptop and see)     It could be NGFF, mini-
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MIPI Video Interfaces

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Recently i had an opportunity to work with the much celebrated MIPI Video interfaces , specifically MIPI CSI-2 Interface.  CSI-2 is one among the various MIPI Alliance standards , all of them are proprietary. It is meant to interface High Speed/High Resolution Cameras to mobile processors like Snapdragon. Unlike conventional video interfaces  where pixel clock is the main reference time stamp, MIPI is little bit different. To start with understanding, consider MIPI as just a data transfer protocol like UART, but obviously not simple as UART.          The beauty of MIPI lies in two main factors. 1. Low Power Consumption 2. Scalable Speed. The actual MIPI Specification talks about a lot of features that should/or may have for MIPI compatibility.  But here we can concise the spec to few points like. 1. The actual video transmission is done in High Speed State, in Differential signalling 2. The interface goes to a low power state during the video blanking times(H/V). 3. The clo
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MATLAB with RTL SDR and Xilinx FPGA devices

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Just like GNU Radio in Linux, MATLAB could be used for RF decoding and analysis with RTL SDR as source. Communication tool box in MATLAB has option to add RTL-SDR support to MATLAB. Similarly MATLAB also supports Xilinx FPGAs to be used as hardware platforms for users to develop algorithms in system block level , and hence hiding many low level design design hurdles during fpga development of the same. MATLAB can work together with Xilinx System Generator for this purpose. Many DSP functions are available as xilinx blocks in MATLAB-Simulink Library http://in.mathworks.com/hardware-support/rtl-sdr.html
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XMOS multicore-microcontrollers

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Lets go through another new trend in the ever evolving embedded systems development field. We see a huge leap in multicore processors.The number of cores extend from 2 to 16 or even more. But such a trend was never observed in micro-controllers which forms the heart of many Real time embedded systems. Such systems are self contained and are built and tested for limited but fail proof applications. A multicore environment didnt find any taste here. But as systems got complex and upgradation or adaptations become necessary within very limited time gaps, even microcontrollers needed to be flexible or more powerfull. The need for time critical embedded devices boomed up in military, aerospace, multimedia or even in consumer electronics field. Conventional microcontrollers have limitation in their I/O response time, task completion time, flexibity and peripheral support  XMOS is a fabless semiconductor startup from 2005 with the vision of configurable processing in multicore microcon
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