Blog Archive: March 2024
The Year of the ARM SOC
On January 1st, 2003 In Technology
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
On January 1st, 2003 In Technology
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
On January 1st, 2003 In Technology
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