FPGAs vs. DSPs: A look at the unanswered questions

BDTI looks at the open questions about FPGAs' performance, cost, power, and ease of development. It also explains why FPGAs might benefit from the move to deep-submicron processes.


BDTI recently completed an in-depth analysis of FPGAs' suitability for DSP applications. We found that, in some high-performance signal processing applications, FPGAs have several significant advantages over high-end DSP processors. Our recent benchmark results (shown in Figure 1), for example, have shown that high-end, DSP-oriented FPGAs have a huge throughput advantage over high-performance DSP processors for certain types of signal processing. And FPGAs, which are not constrained by a specific instruction set or hardwired processing units, are much more flexible than processors.

If market success were based solely on throughput or flexibility, FPGAs would appear to be on the verge of taking over the DSP market; in fact, according to a recent report from market research firm Forward Concepts, in 2005 Altera and Xilinx each had DSP FPGA revenues in excess of $200 million, selling more non-cell-phone DSP silicon than Freescale and Agere.
But of course, it's not that simple. Development effort, energy efficiency, cost-effectiveness, staff expertise, and market inertia (among other attributes) will all play a role in determining whether FPGAs become a dominant technology for DSP systems.
In this article, we'll share some of the key open questions that we've identified during the course of our analysis. These factors will affect FPGAs' success in DSP markets, and will be of significant interest to system designers who are considering using FPGAs in their signal processing systems.
To read the full article, click here
Related Semiconductor IP
- Process/Voltage/Temperature Sensor with Self-calibration (Supply voltage 1.2V) - TSMC 3nm N3P
- USB 20Gbps Device Controller
- SM4 Cipher Engine
- Ultra-High-Speed Time-Interleaved 7-bit 64GSPS ADC on 3nm
- Fault Tolerant DDR2/DDR3/DDR4 Memory controller
Related White Papers
- DSPs vs. FPGAs for multiprocessing
- SRAM PUF: A Closer Look at the Most Reliable and Most Secure PUF
- A closer look at security verification for RISC-V processors
- A Survey on SoC Security Verification Methods at the Pre-silicon Stage
Latest White Papers
- Fault Injection in On-Chip Interconnects: A Comparative Study of Wishbone, AXI-Lite, and AXI
- eFPGA – Hidden Engine of Tomorrow’s High-Frequency Trading Systems
- aTENNuate: Optimized Real-time Speech Enhancement with Deep SSMs on RawAudio
- Combating the Memory Walls: Optimization Pathways for Long-Context Agentic LLM Inference
- Hardware Acceleration of Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) in Large-Scale Systems