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The DINI Group Newsletter
October 20, 2005
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* The silicon zoo – images buried on silicon
* World’s Ugliest Dog
* On a lighter note – kitten pictures (yet again)
* Booth at GSPx Conference Santa Clara (10/24-10/27/2005)
* Seasonal humor:
Barfing
pumpkin
* DINI Painting survives Katrina?
* Seminar with Synplicity on ‘Real-time Functional Verification’
* DN8000k10 soon to ship: 24 million gates, 16 Virtex-4 FPGA’s
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* The silicon zoo – images buried on silicon
I am a fan of personalizing the engineering work that I do. A few,
non-mission
critical embedded systems that I worked on in the past have buried
pictures
of me or will do *odd* things if a specific, but impossible, set of
keystrokes
is pressed. The software people have a technical term for this:
‘easter egg’.
Whole web pages are dedicated to these things – go here
Eggs Web Page.
Those of us in the HW field have no such term, but the practice is
common.
This is an issue for us at the moment, since the designers of a new, and
vital,
piece of silicon put the company logo on the die and in the process broke
a
key function of the device. Anyway, a group at Florida State
University has
put together a set of pictures showing some silicon artwork and the
gallery
is entertaining. The subjects include
Dilbert (on a uP), a
Smurf
dragging a
copyright logo (on a Siemens chip), and others.
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* World’s Ugliest Dog
I want you to meet Sam, the undefeated champion of the World’s Ugliest
Dog
championship. I am NOT joking – this is a real animal. The
tuft of white hair
is a nice touch. Sam. A
smidgen more than I have up there …
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* On a lighter note – kitten pictures (yet again)
Amy’s Himalayan cat, Button, has had a litter of kittens again. If you
are through
retching from the Sam-dog-thing above, you will like these pictures of
kittens at
4 weeks.
Kittens (4 weeks). The unfocused eyes kill me. Unfortunately
kittens
become CATS with devastating consequences.
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* Booth at GSPx Conference Santa Clara (10/24-10/27/2005)
We will have a cool booth at the GSPx Conference in Santa Clara.
The topic of
this conference is ‘Pervasive Signal Processing’. The tracks and
the papers are
quite interesting. If you work in Silicon Valley, this is an
excellent excuse to
take the day off and join us at the Santa Clara convention center. GSPx
conference
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* Seasonal humor:
Barfing
pumpkin
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* DINI Painting survives Katrina?
One of my paintings in the private art collection of Rob and Colleen
Rangel is
not lost. The painting was on the second floor and appears to have
survived
the storm and subsequent flood. It might be covered with fungus, which is
possibly an improvement.
Painting not
lost in Katrina
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* Seminar with Synplicity on ‘Real-time Functional Verification’
Join The Dini Group and Synplicity for this technical and educational
seminar
and learn how:
-Advances in verification technology have made multi-FPGA prototyping
of ASIC designs faster, cheaper and better
-to identify bugs that would not be caught by simulation alone
-the use of the correct synthesis and debug tools can cut weeks or even
months off of your verification cycle
-your next ASIC can be verified more quickly and completely
We are just about ready to start shipping the DN8000k10 ‘Son of
Monster’.
This thing is huge: 14 LX200’s and 2 FX100’s and nearly 24 million gates
measured the old fashioned way: conservatively. All FPGA to FPGA
interconnect
is differential (at >350MHz). DN8000k10 * 'Son of
Monster'
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Mike
Dini
President
The DINI Group
1010 Pearl Street, Suite #6
La Jolla, CA 92037-5165
Phone: (858) 454-3419 ext. 11
FAX: (858) 454-1728
cellular: (619) 888-9173
home: (858) 454-1026
mailto:mdini@dinigroup.com
http://www.dinigroup.com