FPGAs

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—FPGAs Crash the Party

These days, digital signal processing enables everything from satellites to engine controllers. With their decades of experience, one would expect DSP processor vendors to have a lock on these applications. All they have to do is belly up to the all-you-can-eat buffet, right? Not if FPGA vendors can help it. Until fairly recently, FPGAs lacked the capacity to implement demanding DSP algorithms—and they were perceived as being too expensive and power-hungry to compete with DSPs anyway. One Read more...

DSP-Enhanced FPGAs: Altera vs. Xilinx

On February 11, Altera introduced its all-new Stratix family of FPGAs. These FPGAs feature hard-wired DSP logic blocks; each DSP block can perform up to eight 9-bit, four 18-bit, or one 36-bit multiplications per cycle, with optional accumulation of up to two results. The DSP blocks also contain "pipeline registers;" using these registers increases latency but allows the DSP block to operate at higher clock rates--at over 250 MHz, according to Altera. The main competitor for the Stratix Read more...