Platform FPGA design for high-performance DSPs

As DSP technologies find their way into high-end, high-complexity commercial and consumer applications, developers are discovering the limitations of traditional Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) to satisfy their performance requirements. The processing complexity in many of these applications requires massive parallelism to perform complex DSP functions in real time. The cost of using large DSP farms to implement such parallelism is often far too prohibitive in terms of price, power and form factor, leaving the system designer no choice but to seek alternative solutions.

This paper discusses the unique capabilities platform FPGA-based designs offer when used to help meet the challenges of today's demanding high-performance real-time DSP applications, both as stand-alone solutions and as complementary solutions for traditional DSPs. A detailed investigation of the use of model-based design methodologies reveals the ease with which platform FPGAs can be employed to accommodate these highly complex DSP implementations. Finally, an example in the wireless arena – Multiple Input, Multiple Output (MIMO) technology – is used to illustrate the concepts.

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