The Art of Digital Video, 4th Edition

INTRODUCTION

Starting with binary data, one can define a process to manipulate those data entirely mathematically. It is important to understand the process before considering the implementation. A large number of choices of processing mechanisms exist today, all of which must give the same result if properly engineered. A fixed set of gates may be hardwired to implement a process in which the highest speed is required, whereas a general purpose processor can implement a process under software control at lower speed but with greater flexibility. Somewhere between those extremes, a field programmable gate array (FPGA) is a set of logic gates whose ...