Let me introduse my blog. My name is Yuri Rumyantsev - FPGA designer and software programmer from Moscow Russia. I work for Russian company Rosta Ltd. I want to make this blog professinal - here I will discuss whatever conserns me in computer and electronic industry. I will try to share my skills and knowledge of hands on experience of FPGA design, embedded programming and system software development.
Also I am instructor of "FPGA Design Methodology" training course at Moscow State University, so I plan to post here topics on FPGA use cases in education and research.
Allthough I am from Russia, I plan to, but not restricted to, write in this blog in English for several resons.
- To make this blog available for broader audience
- Have a little more practice in English
But language should not be an issue here, so I welcome comments also in Russian.
Hey:)
ReplyDeleteNice to see you start a pro blog, this is something I'm planning to do myself. What's even nicer is that we have things to talk about.
I work for a manufacturer of TV broadcasting mediaservers, which use Vertex FPGAs for video encoding/decoding. The programmable nature of these chips allows us to field-upgrade our hardware to support new audio/video formats and codecs.
We're rolling out a new generation of servers, which combine recent FPGAs with software decoding on Intel's latest Xeons. So I'll be thrilled to hear some firsthand stories from that field.
Hope you don't lose interest and keep this blog alive:) BTW, the login seems to be broken, I managed to post this comment only through AIM.
Mihail Zorin
Congrats Yuri for sharing your knowledge! I hope you keep on writing in English, because Google Translator is not really good with Russian language xD
ReplyDeleteHi, Mike, glad to hear from you! I hope you find smth usefull here.
ReplyDeleteI already have a question about your servers. How do you upgrade FPGA configuration to support new encoding algorithm? Do you have to pull modules out of computer, or there is a software way to do that? Anyway is restart of server needed for new configuration to get started?
The reason why I am asking this is that there is a perferct way to switch to another encoding algorythm online without pulling out modules and even without computer restart. It is based on dynamic partial reconfiguration that modern FPGAs fully support. The trick is that inside FPGA there are two region - a static with for example PCI Express interface and reconfigurable region that you can configure just downloading data to it from host software application through PCI Express bus. At the end the devices continues to work and there is no need to restart computer for the system to recognize new capability of hardware because from the system point of view nothing has changed - it is the same pcie device with the same ID's and memory requirments. What is added - is the functionality that's behind the interface.
I have just learned how to do that on our modules and my next post will be about FPGA Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration via PCI Express bus.
Stay tuned =))