FPGA-based Implementation of Signal Processing Systems

Preface

DSP and FPGAs

Digital signal processing (DSP) is used in a very wide range of applications from high-definition TV, mobile telephony, digital audio, multimedia, digital cameras, radar, sonar detectors, biomedical imaging, global positioning, digital radio, speech recognition, to name but a few! The topic has been driven by the application requirements which have only been possible to realize because of development in silicon chip technology. Developing both programmable DSP chips and dedicated system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for these applications, has been an active area of research and development over the past three decades. Indeed, a class of dedicated microprocessors have evolved particularly targeted at DSP, namely DSP microprocessors or DSPμs.

The increasing costs of silicon technology have put considerable pressure on developing dedicated SoC solutions and means that the technology will be used increasingly for high-volume or specialist markets. An alternative is to use microprocessor style solutions such as microcontrollers, microprocessors and DSP micros, but in some cases, these offerings do not match well to the speed, area and power consumption requirements of many DSP applications. More recently, the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) has been proposed as a hardware technology for DSP systems as they offer the capability to develop the most suitable circuit architecture for the computational, memory and power requirements of the application in a similar way ...