Actel Smartfusion

Yesterday, I went to Seattle for a presentation (they call it a "design workshop") on Atmel's Smartfusion devices.  They have combined their Flash-based FPGA with an ARM Cortex-M3, the usual micro-controller peripherals, and some configurable analog blocks to make a very flexible, mixed-signal, embedded device.  I brought home an eval board and some thoughts on their technology.

Your utility thinks you are lazy and stupid

Someone was wrong on the internet.  That’s certainly not news nor something I want to try to battle every day. But in this case, the problem I discovered appears to be spreading and it is affecting important decisions in the real world.

The energy industry is selecting which technologies to implement based on the belief that consumers are “stupid and lazy”.  I’ve tracked down the source of this problem.