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Brad's comments on the world of technology...

Blog Archive: April 2024

The Year of the ARM SOC

The Year of the ARM SOC Seems like everyone and his brother is making an ARM SOC. I'll swear there are 50 different vendors making them. Do we need all of these? I guess so. Intel, Sharp, Fujitsu, Samsung to name a few. It is nice because each one seems a little different. It's also nice because building a small embedded device which

Microchip PIC18's - nice

I've been doing some PIC programming lately. I really love Microchip's parts. Simple, cheap, effective. The 18F series is my current love. The 18F458 has lots of flash, a CAN controller, serial an a little RAM. I wired one up to a Cirrus 8900 ethernet chip and write a simple TCP stack for it. Amazing huh? Other have done this before me, but

Xilinx Virtex II Pro - wow

My vote for the cool SOC of the year (2003) is the Xilinx Virtex II Pro. It's a PPC 405 with a giant fpga. It's also a lot of IP which does all of the normal things like ethernet, serial, etc... Maybe everyone knows this but looking over the interface docs I was having some major deja-vu from some work I did for IBM a few years back. It