bisrig

The issue with the oceanic flights is that there are no receiving stations for the ADS-B messages, as these stations are ground based. Therefore, there is no way to receive the position reports to feed into the flight data network.

Something to keep in mind regarding "completeness": only planes equipped with ADS-B transponders will generally be picked up by this (I say generally because I'm not sure if they are trying any multilateration techniques here on the Mode S). Prevalence of ADS-B is OK at best and very dependent on geographical area and type of aircraft (general aviation, commercial domestic, commercial international, etc).

Not trying to be snarky at all, but can you cite a reference re: SystemVerilog = 90% of the US market? Very curious as I would consider myself to be a pretty experienced HDL user and have never seen SystemVerilog in the wild. I am guessing this is a FPGA vs. ASIC thing.

OK, I'll bite. Are there tool/design flows out in the wild using HDLs in the PCB design process? I guess describing basic connectivity is relatively easy to imagine, but it's less obvious how you would do things like PCB layout etc. Would love to be pointed towards examples.

(FPGA guy here - used to using VHDL/Verilog for digital logic simulation and synthesis, never considered it for board design)

Or a toaster oven and reflow controller a la the Sparkfun board (though a bunch of other hobbyist folks have done the same or similar).

Agree on the debugging part though.

Do you have links to any tutorial, intros or such for the list that you enumerated above? I am very much in appreciation of your (and everyone else's) feedback - learning of a number of new options and approaches that are worth further research.

As an FPGA guy, I want to ask this - what software programming languages, models, etc. exist to support the description of fundamentally concurrent processing, whether task-parallel, data-parallel, hybrid, or "other" (whatever that may be) that will allow for the supplanting of HDLs? I know that there's been long-standing efforts to do C-to-HDL but to my knowledge the successes of this approach have been limited to relatively constrained solution spaces.

I guess my feeling is that there's a fundamental difference between the sequential execution inherent in something like C and the ability to describe concurrency that is fundamental to HDLs, and it's going to be a hard bridge to build.

Side question: are "SW guys" satisfied with the tools/languages available for multi-core development? I've always thought things like OpenMP and CUDA were steps in the right direction but still hacks. It seems to me like there's still problems to solve there as well.

As a follow-on to this, it certainly appears (from quick searches of your site as well as reading through this thread) as though you are not disclosing which banks you are specifically partnering with... this is certainly your choice, of course, but given the events of the past few years, I think that there's a significant number of people that make an active choice not to use certain banks due to their past behaviors - if I were to sign up for something like this, I would be concerned that there would be a chance that I could be implicitly supporting a company that I'm actively not supporting today. Is there any notion of being able to "choose" the partner bank your account is held with, or at least being able to screen a list prior to opening an account?

This is very focused on the basics of fixed-point arithmetic, but it's been helpful to me in the past when working through fixed-point filter design and related topics.

http://www.digitalsignallabs.com/fp.pdf

That ASIC idea is pretty neat - it kind of sounds like taking the problem of single event upset and turning it into a solution, pretty clever.

Thinking about this in terms of what low-level actions are being performed by the Arduino (relay closures, sensor readings, basic I/O), it strikes me how this can be an alternative/complement to platforms like LabView. I feel this is significant due to the prevalence of these platforms in engineering education as well as in industry R&D, test labs, etc. - in my opinion, the more (different) tools that are available and to which people are exposed, the more likely these people will be engaged (in the case of engineering education) or able to get their jobs done.

If you're new to FPGAs or digital design in general, it'd probably be worth your while to pick up a good digital design book. I always liked Wakerly's Digital Design Principles and Practices. I recall that my edition (either 2nd or 3rd) was VHDL-focused, but it looks like the 4th edition has examples in both VHDL and Verilog.

There's also the matter of working through the FPGA toolchains, which isn't exactly a walk in the park. Unfortunately I don't have a good tutorial to reference off the top of my head...