Bunnie Huang's Novena Open-Source Linux Laptop incorporates a User-Programmable Spartan-6 FPGA

by Steve Leibson - Xcell Daily Blog - Xilinx, Dec. 08, 2015 – 

An article in IEEE Spectrum titled "Novena: A Laptop With No Secrets," which describes Bunnie Huang's Novena open-source Linux laptop, stopped me in my tracks when I read "The most extraordinary step we took was to include a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), a type of processor chip that can be reconfigured by its user to change the chip's specs and capabilities. Basically, this reconfigurability allows the chip to do things in hardware that would otherwise have to be done in software."

Being a blogger who writes about FPGAs, I figured I'd better pay closer attention to this article, which continues:

"For instance, if you wanted to accurately control a dozen motors, you'd have a lot of trouble doing that in software. Motion control requires exquisite real-time control over waveforms, and if you try to get your operating system to do that it would constantly be shifting from one task to another and back again, adding too much timing jitter. Imagine that stutter you see in your Web browser but in a self-driving car or a drone: instant wreck. However, it's a relatively simple matter to create hardware that runs the fussy timing and key control loops, and it's also trivial to replicate variations of that hardware again and again in an FPGA.

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