FPGA‐based Implementation of Signal Processing Systems, Second Edition

This chapter highlights the variety of technologies used for implementing complex digital signal processing (DSP) systems. It starts with some remarks on silicon technology scaling and how Dennard scaling has broken down, leading to the evolution of parallelism into conventional DSP platforms. Then, it outlines some further thoughts on architecture and programmability and gives some insights towards the performance limitations of the technologies, and also comments on the importance of programmability. The functional requirements of DSP systems are examined, highlighting issues such as computational complexity, parallelism, data independence and arithmetic advantages. This is followed by a brief description of microprocessors with some more upto-date description of multicore architectures. For completeness, solutions based on the system-on-chip (SoC) are briefly reviewed. A core development has been the partnering of various technologies, namely ARM processors and DSP microprocessors, and ARM processors incorporated in FPGA fabrics.