This year, Flash Memory Summit (FMS) will highlight Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), Persistent Memory, advanced memory technologies, and key Open Source software topics. Xilinx, the leader in production-ready Storage Array to Host Connectivity, will exhibit its next-generation flash storage solutions across ecosystems, partners, and customers.

Functional Safety is the study of methods and measures to reduce risk of harm to people and equipment when machines malfunction or when their operating environment is interrupted. Thinking of the 2018 FIFA World Cup that just ended, if we apply this to a game of football, referees have the ability and power to halt a game when they feel a violation occurs, but don’t always see everything and don’t always make the right call.

In the parlance of Functional Safety, these errors are called random hardware or systematic faults. These errors could make or break a game depending on which side of the field you’re on, so in an ideal sporting world, we could anticipate these erroneous calls and avoid them altogether. Functional Safety seeks to address a similar issue in systems design, where the cost of error could be catastrophic or fatal, such as a machine failing to detect an open panel and causing injury to the human operator or a railroad crossing gate failing and the training hitting a bus. Essentially, Functional Safety design tries to anticipate ways that systems can fail, and when they do, implement Plan B.

If you are someone that wonders, with a healthy dose of cynicism, why seemingly everything is touting as being smart and connected these days, you might ask yourself, “Does that really need to be connected?” (I’m looking at you Bluetooth toothbrush with companion app—I manage to brush my teeth twice a day and scrub them all quite well without your help, thank you very much.) The actual answer is found in human psychology, not technology—or at least it was for me (cue flashback music): in the spring of 2011, Wired Magazine published an article on feedback loops, and not the kind you use in designing latches and flip-flops.

Xilinx has introduced the new Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC ZCU111 Evaluation kit to enable RF-class analog design evaluation, bringing this disruptive technology to the masses to try for themselves. This kit is the first of its kind – featuring a Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC, which integrates multi-gigabit ADC and DAC sampling capability with FPGA logic.