Interesting whitepapers available from TechOnLine

Clive Maxfield

December 29, 2005

Clive Maxfield

If you haven't already taken out your FREE subscription to TechOnLine, you really should do so because there is a tremendous wealth of information available from this site. The following spotlights three of the technical papers that were noted in the latest issue of TechOnLine's Technical Paper Library Highlights newsletter.

Testing the Interrupt Priority Levels of a Microprocessor
This paper presents a simple and successful method of testing the interrupt priority levels in a microprocessor/microcontroller and more particularly to a method of testing the interrupt priority levels in a microprocessor/microcontroller having interrupt sources with one or more priority levels. More …

RapidChip Technology Overview
This paper outlines the fundamental technical concepts of RapidChip Platform ASICs. It is the first White Paper to read when learning about RapidChip technology. More …

Unique Graph-Based Physical Synthesis Technology: For Fast Timing Closure and Improved Performance of FPGA Designs
Traditional synthesis technology is failing to address the needs of today's extremely large and complex FPGA designs implemented in devices at the 90 nm technology node and below. The solution is a unique graph-based physical synthesis technology that provides a single-pass, push-button synthesis step requiring zero (or very few) iterations with the downstream place-and-route engines. Furthermore, graph-based physical synthesis can provide 5 to 20% performance improvement in terms of the overall clock speed of the system.

This paper first presents the main conventional synthesis approaches and explains the problems associated with these techniques. The paper then introduces the concepts underlying graph-based physical synthesis and shows how this technology uniquely addresses the requirements of today's state-of-the-art FPGA architectures. More …

Got the BGA Blues?
The good news is BGAs are great for reducing board space, improving electrical characteristics of circuits and dealing with thermal issues. The bad news comes when you get that first prototype board back from the shop, plug it in and nothing happens – and all of the signals needed to debug the problem are under the BGA packages. This paper introduces a new genre of tools that use boundary scan in a new paradigm for quick, easy, and inexpensive access to all of those otherwise unreachable signals. More …