ıSoftı Hardware, or ıHardı Software?
by Darren Ashby

When I was a young kid, somehow I got hold of a Radio Shack kit that actually tuned AM radio without a battery. (I remember the ıneeded no batteryı part of it amazed me and I was mad I couldnıt get FM this way.) I would sit down and adjust and fiddle and generally have a good time. In retrospect I see that I was bitten by the ıelectronic bugı.ıSome days I wonder if I would be in the profession I am now if I hadnıt made that radio.

ıI have a few other early memories that involve electricity, such as reassembling my motherıs mix master after she had torn it apart to fix. As an eight-year-old I realized it must be those parts which were leftover after I put it back together that were causing the problem, because it worked fine when I was done with it.ıı Then there was the time my brother and I tore apart our sisterıs hairdryer to put the fan on a toy car and make the fastest air powered mini-racer we had ever seen. Too bad the extension cord was only 6 feet long! But I digress, the point is all those creations involved hardware.

I was first exposed to software on a Commodore PET computer that my uncle had in his basement with a screaminı tape drive, and about 8K of memory (just a guess, I didnıt pay much attention to specs back then). I remember writing my first program in basic, something like this:

10 Print ıDarren Ashbyı
20 goto 10

Ahhhhh, was the feeling I got as my name scrolled by on the screen. ıThis is so easy to change,ı I thought as wrote my name in various different ways and patterns. For some reason, maybe prepubescent vanity, I didnıt write much else beside my name that first night.

Up till college, I didnıt really see anything in between ıhardı hardware and ısoftı software. But then along came my first experience with a PLD and a micro-controller. I experienced firmware. It seemed to be a perfect balance between two worlds, one that needed change, and one that needed inexpensive consistency. I still enjoy the way firmware goes right out and touches the real world.

So where is all this rambling leading you ask? Maybe Iım just slow, but it seems to me there is a trend developing out there. The electronics world is becoming more and more configurable, mutable, changeable, all with a few lines of code. Have you heard of Zilogıs digital 550? Or Analog devices digital trim pots? This goes beyond firmware. It is more hardware than software, but you can still change it easily, the very definition of software.

Take for example the new Altera FPGA part. It has a bucket-load of logic elements (like a huge PLD), and to top it off, they have made a design called the NIOS core. This is an arrangement of logic elements that creates a 16-bit processor in the FPGA. So you have a micro-controller implemented completely in software. That statement wouldnıt even have made sense a few years ago. After you put in the micro, you can create other parts with the logic elements. Say you need a serial port on your next design, donıt add another chip, just configure some of the logic elements into a port. Say goodbye to glue logic and PCB changes to reconfigure outputs. Want a USB peripheral, or TCP/IP stack? Coming right up! In fact, if you are the kind of guy that likes to change the Windows registry, you can even change the NIOS core to suit your liking.

So this is completely soft, hardware. What does this mean to engineers? As the price on these super-configurable systems gets better and better, we can use them to get to market and respond to market changes faster. As more get into the market, the price will go down, and more will get used. I think this is the beginning of a cycle that will end in not software, or hardware, just ıware.

Is this technology revolutionary? Probably. But is it as much fun as watching an overpowered air car rip its extension cord out of the socket? I doubt it.

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