FPGAs have been used in DSP applications for years as logic aggregators, bus bridges and peripherals. More recently FPGAs have been gaining considerable traction in high-performance digital signal processing applications and are emerging as ideal co-processors for standard DSP devices. In these latter two roles FPGAs provide tremendous computational throughput by using highly parallel architectures, and are hardware reconfigurable; allowing the designer to develop customized architectures for ideal implementation of their algorithms. The new generation of FPGAs developed using 90-nm process technology not only provide an effective way of implementing high-performance DSP functions but also provide the designer with an even more cost-effective solution. This white paper takes a look at some common high-performance DSP functions and calculates their effective implementation cost based on the published pricing of the underlying FPGA.

Access the entire document on the Xilinx, Inc. website.