What is FPGA

What is FPGA? Simulations and prototyping have been a very important part of the electronics industry since a very long time now. Before heading in for the actual fabrication of a dedicated hardware, everyone would want to be sure that what they are making will work the way they want it to. Over all these years while electronics companies offered dedicated hardware in their products, it was not possible for the end user to reconfigure them to his own needs. This need led to the growth of a new market segment of customer configurable Field Programmable integrated circuits called Field Programmable Gate Arrays or FPGA.

The FPGAs share a common history with most Programmable Logic Devices. The first of this kind of devices was the Programmable Read Only Memory. Further driven by need of specifically implementing logic circuits, Philips invented the Field-Programmable Logic Array (FPLA) in the 1970s. This consisted of two planes, a programmable wired AND-plane and the other as wired OR. It could implement functions in the Sum of Products form. 

Advanced RISC Machines

By now, there would be a very small segment of the mobile community that would not have heard anything about the Android OS by Google. This OS seems to be giving many proprietary vendors a run for their money and the owners many a sleepless nights. But did you know as to what is android depend on for its good performance apart from its robust code? What makes it run so smooth and yet amazingly fast without costing you a fortune? What drives the Android? The answer is ARM Processor, Advanced RISC Machines, previously known as Acorn RISC Machines.

Inspired by the making of 32 bit processors by some undergraduates at Berkeley and a one man design center Western Design Center, Phoenix, Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson of Acorn Ltd. set out to make their own processors. Sophie developed the instruction set and simulated it on the BBC Basic which convinced many in the company that it was not just anything half hearted shot aimed in darkness. With the support and permission of the then CEO Hermann Hauser, the ARM Processor project formally took off in 1983 with VLSI Technology as their silicon partner, to produce an ARM processor with latencies as low as that of the 6502. The first ARM Processor core dubbed as ARM1 was delivered by VLSI Technology in 1985. This processor used in conjunction with the BBC Micro helped in the development of the next generation called ARM2. 1987 saw the release of ARM Archimedes. 

Android

What is Android?

World is toning with the growth of mobile phone technology. As the no. of users is growing day by day, facilities are also increasing. Starting with simple regular handsets which were used just for making phone calls, mobiles have changed our lives and have turn into part of it. Now they are not used just for making calls but they have numerous uses and can be used as a Camera , Music player, Tablet PC, T.V. , Web browser etc . And with the new technologies, new software and operating systems are required.

Operating systems have developed a lot in last 15 years. Starting from black and white phones to current smart phones or mini computers, mobile OS has come far away. particularly for smart phones, Mobile OS has greatly evolved from Palm OS in 1996 to Windows pocket PC in 2000 then to Blackberry OS and Android.


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Humanoid Robots

A Humanoid may be defined as something that resembles or looks like a human and having characteristics like opposable thumb, ability to walk in upright position, etc. Nowadays the concept of humanoids is being widely implemented in robotics and these robots are called Humanoid Robots or may be simply “Humanoids”.

In general humanoid robots have a torso with a head, two arms and two legs, although some forms of humanoid robots may model only part of the body, for example, from the waist up. Some humanoid robots may also have a 'face', with 'eyes' and 'mouth'. Androids are humanoid robots built to resemble a male human, and Gynoids are humanoid robots built to resemble a human female.

Robotics

What does one visualize while thinking of a Robot? Does a robot roll as R2D2 (from Star Wars) or walk upright as C3P0? Does it have expressionistic face or a mechanical one? Does it function as vacuum or picks objects for you? As there are many uses of Robotics, it is reasonable to think that there are various designs too. To know how these complex yet intelligent machines move, one needs to look at their engineering, physics closely.

Other than the sci-fi movies, the Robots can be seen around us assembling the cars, in bottling factory etc. The robots have been in the industry for last two decades because of their continuous working ability in an atmosphere, where humans are not even able to stand for minutes, without any supporting equipment, like space.

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Robotics

What does one visualize while thinking of a Robot? Does a robot roll as R2D2 (from Star Wars) or walk upright as C3P0? Does it have expressionistic face or a mechanical one? Does it function as vacuum or picks objects for you? As there are many uses of Robotics, it is reasonable to think that there are various designs too. To know how these complex yet intelligent machines move, one needs to look at their engineering, physics closely.

Other than the sci-fi movies, the Robots can be seen around us assembling the cars, in bottling factory etc. The robots have been in the industry for last two decades because of their continuous working ability in an atmosphere, where humans are not even able to stand for minutes, without any supporting equipment, like space.

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PIC Microcontroller

The microcontrollers played revolutionary role in embedded industry after the invention of Intel 8051. The steady and progressive research in this field gave the industry more efficient, high-performance and low-power consumption microcontrollers. The AVR, PIC and ARM are the prime examples. The new age microcontrollers are getting smarter and richer by including latest communication protocols like USB, I2C, SPI, Ethernet, CAN etc.   

PIC microcontrollers 

History:

The PIC microcontroller was developed by General Instruments in 1975. PIC was developed when Microelectronics Division of General Instruments was testing its 16-bit CPU CP1600. Although the CP1600 was a good CPU but it had low I/O performance. The PIC controller was used to offload the I/O the tasks from CPU to improve the overall performance of the system.

In 1985, General Instruments converted their Microelectronics Division to Microchip Technology. PIC stands for Peripheral Interface Controller. The General Instruments used the acronyms Programmable Interface Controller and Programmable Intelligent Computer for the initial PICs (PIC1640 and PIC1650).