kmod’s blog

I’ve done a number of projects involving Xilinx FPGAs and CPLDs, and honestly I’m frustrated with them enough to be interested in trying out one of their competitors.  This is pretty rant-y, so take it with a grain of salt but some of my gripes include: Simply awful toolchain support.  The standard approach is to […]

I remarked to a friend recently that technology seems to increase our expectations faster than it can meet them: “why can’t my pocket-computer get more than 6 hours of battery life” would have seemed like such a surreal complaint 10 years ago.  For that reason I want to recognize an experience I had lately that […]

I was excited to see recently that ARM announced their new Cortex-M7 microcontroller core, and that ST announced their line using that core, the STM32F7.  I had briefly played around with the STM32 before, and I talked about how I was going to start using it — I never followed up on that post, but I got […]

Sometimes I start a project thinking it will be about one thing: I thought my FPGA project was going to be about developing my Verilog skills and building a graphics engine, but at least at first, it was primarily about getting JTAG working.  (Programming Xilinx FPGAs is actually a remarkably complicated story, typically involving people […]

I’ve seen a lot of references to the wearables market lately with a lot of people getting very excited about it.  I can’t tell though, is it actually a thing that people will really want?  Lots of companies are jumping into it and trying to provide offerings, and the media seems to be taking it […]

I’ve seen the Mill CPU come up a number of times — maybe because I subscribed to their updates and so I get emails about their talks.  They’re getting a bunch of buzz, but every time I look at their docs or watch their videos, I can’t tell — are they “for real”?  They certainly […]