FPGA-based Implementation of Signal Processing Systems, 2nd Edition

5 Current FPGA Technologies

   

5.1 Introduction

The analysis at the end of previous chapter makes it clear that the choice of the specific technology and the resulting design approach directly impacts the performance that will be achieved. For example, the use of simple DSP microcontrollers typically implies a DSP system with relatively low performance requirements such as medical or industrial control systems. The design effort is only that needed to produce efficient C or C++ source code for its implementation, and indeed it may be possible to use the software compilers associated with MATLAB^® or LabVIEW that the user may have used as the initial design environment to scope the requirements such as wordlength and system complexity.

This design approach can be applied for the full range of “processor”- style platforms, but it may be required that dedicated handcrafted C code is produced to achieve the necessary performance. This is probably particularly relevant in applications where performance requirements are tight. Also, the hardware may possess dedicated functionality that is not well supported within the high-level tool environment. In these cases, it is clear that the platform will be chosen to meet some superior area, speed and power performance criteria.

Mindspeed’s T33xx family of wireless application processors (Mindspeed 2012) have been directly targeted at base stations for mobile services and thus have dedicated functionality such as forward error correction ...