Benchmarking is important in the embedded world, where we need to know whether applications will meet their real-time constraints, how much resources they use and power they consume. For my work on the energy consumption of compiler options, I constructed a set of benchmarks that had certain desirable characteristics for measuring energy consumption Read More
I am not a fan of patents. I see companies of all sizes racing to patent new ideas, not because they particularly want or need to, but to give them a bulwark against law suits from other patent holders. In… Read More
The Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, together with the Comino Foundation, are hosting a day-long interactive showcase and celebration of making at London's historic Somerset House on Wednesday 19th June. Dr Jeremy Bennett will be giving a talk at midday, entitled Open Source Hardware: How freely available designs drive education, innovation and industrial progress. Read More
This blog post introduces the project I will be working on during an internship with Embecosm. The internship is supported by HiPEAC, an organisation with a key aim of promoting collaboration between industry and academia. This… Read More
Powerful FPGA development boards are now easily within the price range of the hobbyist. The Terasic DE0-Nano is around £65/$100, yet capable of running a complete Linux-capable SoC. Last weekend, to coincide with Hardware Freedom Day, a group of us ran a hands-on workshop, Chip Hack, to introduce complete beginners to FPGA development Read More
Big science is important, not just because the questions it asks define what it is to be human, but because experiments of such magnitude have the potential to change all the fields of science around them Read More
Over summer Embecosm funded a research project with the University of Bristol, into how compiler optimisations affect the energy consumption of applications. That project is now complete and the benchmarks and… Read More
Embecosm received both 16 and 64-core Parallella prototypes as part of their Kickstarter reward package and have decided to make the 16-core board available for use by the community. Requests for network access are now invited Read More
There have been a number of talks at OSHUG meetings on FPGA technology and projects where it has been put to impressive uses such as software-defined radio and video synthesis. Each time generating much interest from members of the group from who are keen to experiment with FPGAs, but that also find the prospect of HDL programming and FPGA workflows daunting Read More
Not often do you listen to a lawyer speaking and wish he had talked for longer. But then Andrew Katz is no ordinary lawyer. He's an open source IP specialist, and recently he's been turning his skills to hardware licensing, notably with the SolderPad and CERN Open Hardware Licenses… Read More