FPGAs

Special Preview: The Evolving Role of FPGAs in DSP Applications

Editor’s Note: This article contains selected highlights from BDTI’s new report, FPGAs for DSP, Second Edition. In recent years, FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) have become increasingly attractive as signal processing engines, sometimes used alone and sometimes in conjunction with a processor chip. The largest FPGA vendors, Altera and Xilinx, have invested heavily in developing DSP-oriented chips and development tools. BDTI has just completed an in-depth study of these DSP-oriented Read more...

Xilinx Unveils Virtex-5 Product Line

On May 15, Xilinx, Inc. unveiled its new Virtex-5 line of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The product line will consist of four distinct families, each targeting a specific class of applications. While all four families share the same basic architecture, each will have a different mixture of hard-wired blocks and I/O features geared for its targeted applications. The three currently sampling devices are from the LX family and target high-speed logic applications. The remaining three Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Brainy FPGA Tools?

I’m starting to wonder if executives at FPGA companies are having conversations like those of the cartoon characters in “Pinky and the Brain”: Pinky: “Gee, Brain, what are we going to do today?” Brain: “The same thing we do every day, Pinky—try to take over the world!” Clearly FPGA vendors are no longer content to provide a little glue logic here and there. A few years ago they started pushing hard into the multi-billion-dollar DSP space, and now (as I wrote in the April 2006 Impulse Read more...

Inside DSP on Tools: FPGA Tools Bridge Gap Between Algorithm and Implementation

Increasingly FPGAs are being used to perform signal-processing tasks, particularly in computationally demanding application areas such as video processing and communications. Their massive parallelism often allows FPGAs to handle data rates much higher than what DSPs and general-purpose processors can manage, and in today’s world of rapidly evolving applications and standards FPGAs’ programmability is an advantage over hard-wired solutions. In recent years FPGA vendors have begun to include Read more...

Altera Unveils Unique Structured ASICs

On Monday Altera announced HardCopy II, the latest in its line of structured ASIC offerings. Like Altera’s previous structured ASICs, HardCopy II allows designers to migrate an FPGA design to a more efficient device once programmability is no longer needed. Just as the original HardCopy could only be used with Altera’s Stratix FPGAs, HardCopy II can only be used with Stratix II FPGAs. HardCopy II chips cost roughly one-tenth as much as equivalent Stratix II FPGAs. And, according to Altera Read more...

Xilinx Unveils Virtex-4 Details

Xilinx recently announced the architectural details of its new FPGA family, the Virtex-4. As explained in the July 2004 edition of “Inside DSP,” the Virtex-4 family includes three “platforms” that feature different ratios of reconfigurable logic, multipliers, and other features. These platforms give Virtex-4 users freedom to choose a feature mix that is best for their applications. For example, all three platforms include a device with roughly 60,000 logic cells. The LX “logic” device Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—DSP: The Flavor of the Week?

Last month MIPS announced a set of signal-processing-oriented instruction set extensions for its RISC architecture. Although these extensions significantly improve the signal-processing capabilities of the MIPS architecture, they won't win MIPS any special attention—all the other major general-purpose processor architectures have been offering signal-processing-oriented features for years. Indeed, it is starting to become difficult to find a processor that doesn't include some kind of signal Read more...

New FPGAs Target Signal Processing

In the last month, FPGA vendors launched a wave of architectures targeting signal processing. These new architectures—the Xilinx Virtex-4, the Lattice Semiconductor LatticeECP, and the Altera Cyclone II—differ in many important respects, but all three feature hard-wired multipliers sprinkled among their reconfigurable logic elements. Xilinx's new offering, the Virtex-4, targets high-performance applications. The Virtex-4 family contains three distinct sub-families that Xilinx calls " Read more...

Inside DSP: A New Slant—Welcome to InsideDSP

CMP Media and BDTI are pleased to introduce Inside[DSP], an innovative new series of periodic supplements to EE Times. Each Inside[DSP] supplement will focus on the digital signal-processing technology behind a particular end-equipment market. These will include product categories such as consumer audio and video, mobile multimedia devices, automotive signal-processing applications, and communications equipment. “What?” you say, “Another trade publication? Don't these guys understand that I' Read more...

Reconfigurable Architectures Win Backing for 3G

Reconfigurable processors have long shown great promise for performance-hungry signal processing applications, but these architectures have garnered little mainstream acceptance. This may be changing, though; recent announcements suggest reconfigurable processors may soon become common in 3G base stations. Architecturally, reconfigurable processors share some attributes with digital signal processors (DSPs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and application-specific integrated Read more...