Whether it’s multi-core approaches such as the Tile64 or FPGA-based approaches such as the OpenSPARC reported on recently, evidence of the dematerialization trend is everywhere. I recently came upon a site that is at the center of this

In those early days of my career, hardware design was a real man’s game. We designed big boxes with loud fans that roared as if boasting of its impressiveness. Then came ASICs where all of sudden your innovation was miniaturized into something only an inch across. Today, chips are disappearing altogether and the real design work is in IP— making chips and systems are simply manufacturing steps.

The focus of an engineer today is either in creating IP, or assembling others IP into dream fulfilling subsystems. The power and influence of the engineer simply keeps expanding, being able to create larger and larger works from the work of others.

Design & Resuse 

This site should be helpful to people creating solutions requiring devices that interact with the internet.

IBM is pushing its Jazz developer collaboration technology as a research tool and has given money to some universities that are researching how to break down cultural and geographic barriers when developing software…. Three universities were awarded the grants to help drive the software community’s ability to think beyond the individual developer to organizational productivity. The University of California, Irvine, is exploring the use of multi-monitor environments to improve project awareness and development practices. Two other awardees, the University of British Columbia and University of Victoria, both in Canada, are embracing the collaboration capabilities of Jazz and researching software development team interactions and communication.eWeek: IBM Touts Jazz for Research

Touching on topics I’ve mentioned previously in Software Visualization and IBM Jazz and Location oriented software development, CNN reports that

In its research, the University of California, Irvine is exploring the use of multi-monitor environments to improve project awareness and development practices. To date, software engineering tools are designed under the assumption that they must effectively operate on a single monitor on a developer’s desk. The trend, however, is to equip developer’s desks with multiple, typically larger monitors, and to equip community areas with tiled displays through which vast amounts of information can be shared. This research leverages Jazz technology to explore how software development tools should be (re)designed to take advantage of this extra display space, with a particular focus on project awareness. The Jazz platform provides many hooks and listeners through which the information that the visualizations need can be obtained.

CNN Money

Via Dwayne Lee at Sun the following video of a OpenSPARC T1 chip running on an FPGA

For the hands-on, hardware-minded folk, some links from a Squeak hardware mail list discussion on the state of the FPGA-based Plurion project which zoom in another level on the evolution of the hardware-software relationship.

• IDaSS - Interactive Design and Simulation System
• JOP - Java Optimized Processor
• Hardware Objects