Nios-II, the second generation of Altera’s soft processor core, will address the test and verification issues of its predecessor, according to the FPGA firm. Unveiled this week, Nios-II has several times the performance of Nios, but perhaps more importantly the user experience has been simplified. “With Nios a lot of our customers were hardware engineers, plus a few software engineers,” ...

Industry horror stories are being overworked to persuade customers into rash judgements for SoC designs, according to the CEO of Tensilica Chris Rowen. “Everyone is talking up their angle,” Rowen told EW, “the Asic guys are saying if you try and do your own designs you won’t get first time right silicon; the EDA people are trying to get you ...