Aldec and High-Performance Computing

by Benard Murphy

Aldec continues to claim a bigger seat at the table, most recently in their attendance at SC17, the supercomputing conference hosted last month in Denver. I’m really not sure how to categorize Aldec now. EDA company seems to miss the mark by a wide margin. Prototyping company? Perhaps, though they have a much stronger focus on end-applications than a general-purpose prototyping solution, witness also recent attendance at the Trading Show in Chicago this year, where they were showing off platforms to support high-frequency trading (HFT).

In at least some of these applications it isn’t even clear that the Aldec solution is limited to prototyping. In low-volume applications (for example HFT), the Aldec boards may well be the final implementation. This is certainly apparent in some of the solutions they talked about at SC17: a DES code-breaker, a ViBe motion detector and a solution for short reads alignment in genome sequencing, as close to live applications as you can get.

For the rest of this article, please visit SemiWiki.