Starbleed vulnerability: Attackers can gain control over FPGAs

Field Programmable Gate Arrays, FPGAs for short, are flexibly programmable computer chips that are considered very secure components in many applications. Starbleed vulnerability In a joint research project, scientists have now discovered that a critic… Continue reading Starbleed vulnerability: Attackers can gain control over FPGAs

Mithro Runs Down Open Source FPGA Toolchains

Tim [Mithro] Ansell has a lot to tell you about the current state of open FPGA tooling: 115 slides in 25 minutes if you’re counting. His SymbiFlow project aims to be the GCC of FPGA toolchains: cross-platform, multi-platform, completely free, and all-encompassing. That means that it’s an umbrella framework for …read more

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Wind River and Xilinx develop new platform for automated driving apps

Wind River, a leader in delivering software for the intelligent edge, announced a collaboration with Xilinx on the development of a comprehensive automated driving platform that integrates Xilinx’s Versal adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP) a… Continue reading Wind River and Xilinx develop new platform for automated driving apps

Who Could Possibly Need An FPGA with 9M Logic Cells and 35B Transistors?

Xilinx recently announced the Virtex UltraScale+ VU19P FPGA. Of course, FPGA companies announce new chips every day. The reason this one caught our attention is the size of it: nearly 9 million logic cells and 35 billion transistors on a chip! If that’s not enough there is also over 2,000 …read more

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Xilinx acquires Solarflare enabling new converged SmartNIC solutions

Xilinx, the leader in adaptive and intelligent computing, announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Solarflare Communications, an Irvine, Calif.-based privately-held company. Solarflare is a leading provider of high-performan… Continue reading Xilinx acquires Solarflare enabling new converged SmartNIC solutions

FPGA used VHDL for Fractals

Over on GitHub, [ttsiodras] wanted to learn VHDL. So he started with an algorithm to do Mandelbrot sets and moved it to an FPGA. Because of the speed, he was able to accomplish real-time zooming. You can see a video of the results, below.

The FPGA board is a ZestSC1 that has a relatively old Xilinx Spartan 3 chip onboard. Still, it is plenty powerful enough for a task like this.

The project doesn’t directly drive a display. It does the math, stores the results in the board’s onboard RAM and then sends a frame to the PC using the …read more

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Racing the Beam on a Thin Client, in FPGAs

A few years back, a company by the name of Pano Logic launched a line of FPGA-based thin clients. Sadly, the market didn’t eventuate, and the majority of this stock ended up on eBay, to eventually be snapped up by eager hackers. [Tom] is one of those very hackers, and decided to try some raytracing experiments with the hardware.

[Tom] has one of the earlier Pano Logic clients, with VGA output and a Xilinx Spartan-3E 1600 FPGA under the hood. Due to limited RAM in the FPGA, and wanting to avoid coding a custom DRAM controller for the memory on …read more

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