Happy new year (belated).

Embrace change Anthony Cataldo, EE Times: Altera to spin new FPGA for 90-nm production

Altera: Cyclone Devices … Shipping Ahead of Schedule.

“With only 15 months from conception to shipment, the development of the Cyclone device family is the fastest in Altera’s history.”

Altera: … Delivery of First Stratix GX Devices. Now sampling.

Impressive.  Congratulations.  Execute, execute, execute.

Xilinx: Enables Gibson Guitar’s Best of Show Award. I saw this at CES.  A guitar with an ethernet jack.

“Gibson will offer MaGIC, an acronym for Media-accelerated Global Information Carrier, in every Gibson guitar within the next 12-18 months. …””MaGIC uses state-of-the-art technology to provide up to 32 channels of 32-bit bi-directional high-fidelity audio with sample rates up to 192 kHz. Data and control can be transported 30 to 30,000 times faster than MIDI.”

Tom Hawkins of Launchbird Design Systems, Inc. announces Confluence 0.1.

“Confluence is a simple, yet amazingly powerful hardware design language. Its flexibility and high level of expression reduces code size and complexity of a design when compared with either Verilog or VHDL. Confluence also enforces clean RTL preventing common errors and bad design practices often introduced in traditional HDL coding.””And unlike C based approaches, design engineers love Confluence because it still feels like coding in HDL. The language is implicitly parallel and very structural. …”

“Confluence runs on Linux x86.”

OK, but please let us know when you run on the volume platform. Does Confluence employ OCaml?  Interesting if so. So far, details sketchy, but welcome, the more, the merrier.

Today’s schedule of the SDRForum Symposium on Use of Reconfigurable Logic in Software Defined Radios.