___________________________________________________________ The DINI Group Newsletter May 14, 2003 ___________________________________________________________ * Stop by our booth at DAC in Anaheim * DN5000k10 and DN5000k10S are in full production * DN3000k10S and DN3000k10 status ... * PCIX Extender - struggling with this ... * Dini comments on the 'VHDL is dead' controversy * VirtexII Pro products will be out shortly * Micron SSRAM's RIP * Synplicity Certify getting good reviews ... * Dini Art ____________________________________________________________ Stop by our booth at DAC in Anaheim We will have a booth at the 40th Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Anaheim. Please help make this DAC show different than last year's event in New Orleans by actually showing up. It gets lonely in the booth when nobody shows up, since it forces me to talk to the heatsink sales people across the isle. The booth number is 1154. Stop in for a minute and then go to Disneyland. Also, I need recommendations for publicity stunts. I'm thinking of a 'Beat the Super Model at Tic-Tac-Toe' for a prize sort of thing. I would, of course, have both male and female super models in the booth to be politically correct. I am not sure I can get show management approval for this sort of thing. You can get more information and register here DAC. ____________________________________________________________ DN5000k10 and DN5000k10S are in full production Both the DN5000k10 and DN5000k10S are in full production. Unlike VirtexII and VirtexII Pro, the Altera's Stratix parts are readily available. Recently Altera started shipping the 1S60, so we can offer any speed grade of the 1S40, 1S60, and 1S80 on the DN5000k10 and DN5000k10S. Remember that the DN5000k10S has the following features: 1 Altera Stratix FPGA in the 1508 FineLine BGA package (EP1S40/60/80) 4 -- 512k x36 SSRAM's 512 Mbytes DDR SDRAM 512 Mbytes SDRAM PC133 (in a 72-bit DIMM) This is our highest performance product, with all external memories running at a frequency of at least 133MHz. DN5000k10S web page The DN5000k10 has the following features: 2-5 Altera Stratix FPGA's in the 1508FF package (EP1S40/60/80) 4 -- 512k x36 SSRAM's 512 Mbytes SDRAM PC133 (in a 72-bit DIMM) This board has a lot of interconnect. I will have a sample at the booth at DAC. DN5000k10 web page The Stratix stuff is pretty good and appears to route well in highly congestive applications. Also, the EP1S80 has 79k FF's, making it the largest FPGA that has a reasonable price. ____________________________________________________________ DN3000k10S and DN3000k10 status ... Our flagship products, the DN3000k10 and DN3000k10S continue to fly off the shelf. The DN3000k10 can hold up to five of the VirtexII 2v4000/6000/8000's. The DN3000k10S can hold a single device. More variations of speed grades are available these days and we have shipped several DN3000k10's with -6 devices. More information on the DN3000k10 is here DN3000k10 More information on the DN3000k10S is here DN3000k10S __________________________________________________________ PCIX Extender - struggling with this ... We are having trouble getting our PCIX Extender working. The RevB parts that Tundra shipped us don't seem to do anything. Contact us if you have an interest in the product since I might be willing to rev the board with the IBM (now Tundra) PCIX bridge. It was supposed to be a good way to slow down PCIX designs to allow for easier emulation, but I am not getting much interest. Information, if you care, is here PCIX Extender. __________________________________________________________ VHDL is Dead (?) The AART (Aart de Geus, CEO of Synopsys) declared VHDL dead is a recent speech. This assertion caused all kinds of controversy, most of it from VHDL designers that have obviously never used Verilog. I will state my Verilog-bigot position once again: 1. I don't know ANYBODY that is fluent in both VHDL and Verilog that prefers VHDL. 2. Remember the infamous Verilog vs. VHDL competition that Cooley did a few years back. See this link: http://www.deepchip.com/items/snug99-42.html. In this contest, not a single VHDL contestant was able to finish the problem. Not one. 3. I hope the competition is using VHDL. 4. We will, however, continue to support both VHDL and Verilog in all Dini Group products. __________________________________________________________ Micron SSRAM's RIP Micron is discontinuing SSRAM production. As best I can determine, they sold the stock to Cypress and just bailed. This is too bad, since this was the brand of SSRAM that we preferred. Also, the Micron web page had (has?) the most wonderful collection of RTL memory models to be found anywhere. Most all ASIC I worked on used the Micron memory models in the test fixtures. So long guys and thanks! We will probably start using Samsung SSRAM's in our products, but Samsung is hard to deal with. They haven't been very interested in selling us the parts. I'll keep you posted. __________________________________________________________ VirtexII Pro products will be out shortly We will have our VirtexII Pro products out shortly. Contact me if you want some pre-release information. The VirtexII Pro stuff is a BITCH to design with. What were they thinking up there in San Jose? We have at least 7 different power supplies on the DN6000k10S and that number looks to increase. But, you will get faster parts, for a cheaper price, with two, 300MHz PowerPC's, and high speed serial I/O's. Incidentally, we are having trouble figuring out what to do with the serial I/O's - they cannot be used for chip-to-chip communication due to latency issues. If you have any needs in this serial I/O area, I would be interested in knowing what they are. __________________________________________________________ Synplicity Certify getting good reviews ... We have Certify models for all of our products. The latest release of Certify is quite good. If you aren't familiar with Certify, it is a tool from Synplicity that helps you partition RTL into multiple FPGA's. Cool Stuff. Get a demo if you haven't had one. __________________________________________________________ Dini Art If you haven't seen any of my artwork, it is posted here: Dini Art __________________________________________________________ Consulting Services... We have some bandwidth available in our consulting services division. Contact us if you have design tasks that you are having trouble staffing. __________________________________________________________ Mike Dini The Dini Group 1010 Pearl Street Suite #6 La Jolla, CA 92037-5165 Phone: (858) 454-3419 Fax: (858) 454-1728 www.dinigroup.com mailto:mdini@dinigroup.com __________________________________________________________ Rem0val Instructions: To be rem0ved from this list email to mailto:mdini@dinigroup.com with REM0VE in the subject line.