Rumors of upcoming gGoogle mobile platform

There are rumors that Google might be working on a mobile platform and a phone. Check it out here.
Google Mobile Service in UK: here
Picture of how the phone could look like: picture

Mobile AJAX

Opera Platform: Mobile AJAX Widgets. Read post here.

How to mitigate 802.11n interference with PC peripherals

An article describing 802.11n standard and ways to avoid interference with other devices working in the same frequency range, like Bluetooth, WiFi and Zigbee.

by Wireless Net Design Line [ Article link]

RFID Overview and Signal Analysis webinar

Webinar (available online until July 25, 2009)

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

This a great video course on computer programming provided for free by MIT. Previously, it was exclusively available to HP employees.

Course link

Book Link

Online version of the book

User Interface Design for Programmers

Interesting article about designing UIs: link

Increasing Popularity of FPGAs

FPGAs are becoming more and more popular with every year of their existence. Previously slow and ignored by system designers working on speed-hungry applications, the newest FPGAs are reaching 600 MHz internal clock speeds. Altera announced it's Stratix III 65nm device at the end of 2006 (link). Xilinx Virtex 5, also 65nm, runs at around the same clock rates (link). Their ease of use, inexpensiveness and availability of read-on-your-own reference material on the internet makes them attractive not only to system designers, but also to students and DIY enthusiasts with a wide variety of applications.

From my experience in semiconductor industry I see that these devices create a serious competition for ASIC manufacturers. They caused at least one project to be canceled during the last year at my company. Companies choose to pay more for flexibility of re-programmable FPGA, rather than investing into a faster ASIC. With the increase of capacity and speed of FGPAs, ASICs will play a less important role then they did years ago.

As an interesting example of FPGA use, Pete Finnigan's security blog mentions that they could be used for faster password cracking. Read it here.

The low price, availability of development boards and easy to use integration software packages make FPGAs attractive to a wider range of users, interested in projects, for example, requiring custom hardware acceleration of simulations. One of my friends used FPGAs for neural net simulation during his Master's. FPGAs really speed up functional computations. A function that lasts hundreds of cycles in software can be computed in few clock cycles given that enough logic gates are used.

More and more FPGA fast prototyping software packages become available on the market. For example, LabView's FPGA kit allows a quick assembly of a system out of precoded optimized blocks ready to be wired together with a few mouse clicks. Even without prior HDL knowledge, one can add hardware accelerated functionality to their designs with ease, using these tools and FPGA development kits.

Numerous learning resources are easily accessible online for free. Xilinx has eLearning section and a quick Google search would reveal dozens of other sources of learning information. Check out www.fpgafromscrtach.com for a step-by-step guide of designing an embedded system on Virtex 4 FPGA.

Related links:
FPGA Design Tutorial from Scratch
Xilinx eLearning

FPGA vs. Microprocessor, Programming Comparison

Here is an interesting entry I found on Zeemz Blog about FPGA vs. Microprocessor programming comparison.

He's referencing Design and Reuse's article from March 2004.

FPGA Design Tutorial from Scratch

Check out this cool step-by-step tutorial that guides you through the process of designing embedded system on Virtex 4 FPGA. Steven Andersson from ZooCad consulting, with 15 years of ASIC design experience, is working on this project for a year on his own time and blogs his experience.

I'd love to put my hands on something like this in the near future.

Tutorial Link

Xilinx Free E-learning courses

Related articles:
Embedded.com
Programming Logic Design

Last.fm

Check out the newly found wigit from Last.fm on the right of the page. I've added a few of my favorites by Rene Gruss, including The Red Room and Bellatrix.

Last.fm is a free online service that seamlessly creates a personalized internet radio that streams the songs that you want or similar to the ones you selected. The radio learns your preferences. One can "love" the track or "hate" it, so it never appears again.

It's one of the sites of Music Genome Project.

Unfortunately, Pandora is not accessible from Canada without a proxy.