Actel Partnership

For the last few months, Stellamar has been working with Actel and several customers to provide Digital ADC solutions to the aerospace market for high reliability space applications.  See the partner page here.

Aerospace engineers weight and power budgets are strapped.  Adding external analog ADCs doesn’t cut it anymore for low level tasks such as on board system monitoring of temperature and voltage.  Actel customers realize this, and look to Stellamar to provide soft Digital ADC cores to embed directly on the FPGA.  A major added benefit we have come to realize, is that these engineers can now completely match their engineering model boards to their flight boards.  This capability greatly helps the engineering team troubleshoot problems during the mission.

We are proud to be working with Actel and its customers.

How to Implement All Digital Analog to Digital Converters in FPGAs and ASICs

This is our first article across the EE Times Designline platforms, and we’re very excited about it!  Follow the link below and check it out.

http://www.eetimes.com/design/programmable-logic/4212273/How-to-implement–All-Digital–analog-to-digital-converters-in-FPGAs-and-ASICs?Ecosystem=programmable-logic

Audio Demonstration Video

We recently shot this short video for our upcoming EE Times Article. This demonstrates our All Digital ADC with 12 bits of resolution and 15kHz bandwidth for an audio application.  Up till now FPGAs did not have a very good option for adding ADCs.  External analog blocks had to be used.  Now we can use the digital fabric of the FPGA to run an ADC.  Perfect for audio and many sensor applications.  Let us know what you think.

SemiWiki

There has been a lot of talk recently about the semi wiki project. From our experience, this industry desperately needs more avenues of communication. Daniel Nenni has blogged about this recently. As the large semiconductor companies slowly move away from building everything in house, forums like these will be very important for the free flow of information to spark new ideas and creative thinking. The blogs and 3rd party IP sites such as www.chipestimate.com are moving the needle a bit, but forums like Semiwiki should give more credibility to what the rest of the industry has to say.

Another Brick in the Wall

To kick off our new blog, we wanted to throw out a topic that has both frustrated us, and launched our business.  That is, the proverbial “brick wall” that stands between analog designers and their digital counterparts.  We, as engineers are a task oriented people capable of tinkering and figuring “stuff” out.  Give us a goal, and we will not come up for air until it is finished.  That mindset is also a hindrance, as we often do not want to seek help, and would rather solve the problems on our own.  The management structures in many large organizations play to this, by giving us, as designers, a goal and strict rules about how it is to be achieved.  “You’re analog, so you do this,” and “you’re digital,  so you do this.”  We both go about our business in our bubbles, trusting that this division of labor is the most efficient.  We NEVER throw an idea over that brick wall that stands between the analog team and the digital team because that’s someone else’s job.  Specialization is necessary as we deal with some very complex topics, but encouraging the free flow of information and ideas across functions is something that is sorely lacking in the industry.  This is surprising since, by nature, we all seem to be life long learners.

Management sometimes doesn’t seem to get it, as evidenced by the rapid degradation in capabilities we have seen at some companies.  The inability to retain and reuse expertise built at those companies is astounding.  People change jobs or companies all the time.  This doesn’t mean that all of their development expertise has to leave with them.  At one company in particular, there is no one that is capable of creating a sigma delta ADC, or capable of understanding how they were developed in the past at that company!  This, too, is a wall- a barrier to communication and learning.  People are not the only ones that learn.  Organizations are also are capable of learning and empowering their people to learn more in a massively powerful feedback loop.

Have you witnessed this?  What can be done about it?  We say, strive to be “just another” cog in the wheel of innovation instead of “just another” brick in the wall.