One of the longest standing “arguments” between engineers in digital design has been the issue of which is best—Verilog or VHDL? For many years this was partly a geographical divide, with North America seeming to be mainly using Verilog and Europe going more for VHDL, although this was not universal by any means. In many cases, the European academic the community was trending toward VHDL with its easy applicability to system level design and the perception that Verilog was really more a “low level” design language. With the advent of SystemVerilog and the proliferation of design tools, these boundaries and arguments have largely subsided, and most engineers realize that they can use IP blocks from either language in most of the design tools. Of course, individuals will always have their own preferences; however, it is true to say that now it is genuinely possible to be language agnostic and use whichever language and tools the user prefers. More often than not, the choice will depend...

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-based navigation system which is consists of 24 orbiting satellites, each of which makes two circuits around the Earth every 24 hours. These satellites transmit three bits of information – the satellite's number, its position in space, and the time the information is sent. These signals are picked up by the GPS receiver, which uses this information to calculate the distance between it and the GPS satellites. With signals from three or more satellites, generally, four satellite signal is pickup by the GPS receiver that can be formed triangulate its location on the ground (i.e., longitude and latitude) from the known position of the satellites. With four or more satellites, a GPS receiver can determine a 3D position (i.e., latitude, longitude, and elevation). In addition, a GPS receiver can provide data on your speed and direction of travel. Anyone with a GPS receiver can access the system. Because GPS provides real-time, three-d...