FPGAs

Xilinx Spartan gets DSP

In recent years, FPGA vendors have been aggressively pursuing high-performance signal processing applications. This month Xilinx broadened its target DSP markets by announcing a new lower-cost DSP-oriented FPGA family, Spartan-3A DSP. Spartan-3A DSP FPGAs are intended to provide better DSP performance than other Spartan devices while being less expensive than Xilinx’s high-performance Virtex-4 and Virtex-5 families. The new chip family targets cost-sensitive applications with high computational Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Efficiency Comes in Many Flavors

It’s generally accepted that, for processing engines, there is a trade-off between efficiency and generality.  The more a chip is geared towards a specific application, the more efficient it’s likely to be (in terms of speed, energy consumption, and cost).  On one end of the spectrum you have traditional FPGAs, which are completely general-purpose, and on the other are fixed-function chips, which are completely application specific. In between these extremes lie various types of processors, Read more...

Stretch Announces Second-generation Software Configurable Processor

On March 5, Stretch, Inc. announced its second-generation software configurable processor family, the S6000, and two initial chips. With this offering—its first since the appointment last year of a new CEO—Stretch is mainly targeting video surveillance, video broadcast, and WiMAX basestation applications. The S6000, like the previous-generation S5000 family, is a RISC processor which incorporates a reconfigurable compute fabric within its datapath. The fabric (which Stretch calls ISEF) Read more...

FPGAs vs. DSPs: A look at the unanswered questions

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 Read more...

Stream Processors Unveils Data-parallel Processor Architecture

Stream Processors, Inc. (SPI) this week unveiled its data-parallel processor architecture and announced two chips based on the architecture.  According to SPI, its architecture is optimized for compute-intensive embedded applications which exhibit a high degree of data parallelism, such as video and imaging.  SPI believes that cost-performance and developer productivity advantages will enable its chips to compete successfully against FPGAs, high-end DSPs, and ASICs in these applications. Read more...

Texas Instruments Announces Multi-core Baseband Processor

In December Texas Instruments announced the TCI6487 multi-core baseband processor. The device will be manufactured in a 65 nm process and is intended mainly for GSM, TD-SCDMA and WiMAX basestation applications. The TCI6487 features three TMS320C64x+ DSP cores running at 1 GHz. In comparison, its predecessor, the TCI6482, featured a single 1 GHz ‘64x+ core. TI has also added an antenna interface supporting OBSAI and CPRI protocols. DSP cores in the TCI6487 communicate with each other and Read more...

PicoChip: Defying the Odds

Editor’s Note: The past year or so has brought a wave of parallel-processor start-ups pursuing digital signal processing applications.  But what about the previous wave?  In the late 1990s and into 2001, a large number of start-ups emerged with unique processor architectures targeting applications like wireless infrastructure.  The vast majority of these, such as Chameleon, Morphics, and Quicksilver, are long gone.  PicoChip, founded in 2000, is an interesting exception.  In this article, Read more...

Altera Hones DSP Capabilities with Stratix III FPGAs

In November Altera announced the Stratix III family, its next generation of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The new devices will be fabricated in a 65 nm process and feature a number of significant architectural changes.  To reduce power consumption, Altera has introduced “Programmable Power Technology,” which allows blocks of logic that don’t need to run at maximum speed to run in a slower, low-power mode.  The sizes of hard-wired memory blocks have been changed relative to the Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—FPGAs vs DSPs: It Depends

Here at BDTI, we just wrapped up a new study comparing DSP-oriented FPGAs to DSP processors.  Like many DSP engineers, I started the project extremely familiar with processors and relatively new to FPGAs. I've ended it with a deeper understanding of the many surprising differences between the two technologies.  I'm not talking about performance differences—though our benchmark results do show some big ones. No, what I'm talking about is how data that's straightforward to obtain for processors Read more...

Characterizing Licensable Core Performance

Comparing licensable processor cores and quantifying their relative performance is challenging. Unlike processor chips, there are many different ways in which licensable cores can be configured, implemented, and fabricated, each of which yields a different combination of speed, area, and power consumption. Particularly for digital signal processing applications (which tend to push the limits on one or more of these metrics) it’s essential to have reliable and accurate performance data. To Read more...