This article reviews the relative strengths and weaknesses of microcontroller (MCU), digital signal processor (DSP), field programmable gate array (FPGA) and application-specific integrated circuit ...

Microcontrollers and FPGAs often work together in embedded systems. As more functions move into the FPGA, however, debugging the interface between the two devices becomes more difficult. The ...

This paper describes the design and implementation of a version of the 8051 microcontroller, one of the most commercially used microcontrollers in FPGA with reconfigurable instruction set.

The Parallax Propeller is an interesting chip that doesn’t get a lot of love, but since the entire chip was released as open source, that might be about to change: people are putting this chip inside ...

As many as half of all embedded designs have an FPGA next to a microcontroller. The FPGA can be used to implement anything from glue logic, to custom IP, to accelerators for computationally intensive ...

Altera’s non-volatile MAX 10 FPGA (Fig. 1) makes a great platform for custom microcontroller applications using soft-cores like Altera’s 32-bit NIOS II processor. It has on-chip flash and RAM ...

Microsemi has introduced a customisable system-on-chip (SoC) device based on its SmartFusion FPGA which is available in commercial and industrial temperature grades. The latest device, the A2F060 ...

CML Microcircuits' CMX7861 'FirmCODEC' is a full featured analogue front end for dsp/fpga/microcontroller based systems. According to CML, the device is a combination of codec, embedded signal ...

After trying out hardware hacking using an FPGA to interface with target hardware, [Grazfather] was inspired to try using the iCEBreaker (one of the many hobbyist FPGAs to have recently flooded the ...