Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are on the verge of revolutionizing digital signal processing in the manner that programmable digital signal processors (PDSPs) did nearly two decades ago. Many front-end digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms, such as FFTs, FIR or IIR filters, to name just a few, previously built with ASICs or PDSPs, are now most often replaced by FPGAs. Modern FPGA families provide DSP arithmetic support with fast-carry chains (Xilinx Virtex, Altera FLEX) that are used to implement multiply-accumulates (MACs) at high speed, with low overhead and low costs [1]. Previous FPGA families have most often targeted TTL “glue logic” and did not have the high gate count needed for DSP functions. The efficient implementation of these front-end algorithms is the main goal of this book. At the beginning of the twenty-first century we find that the two programmable logic device (PLD) market leaders (Altera and Xilinx) both report revenues greater than US$1 billion. FPGAs have enjoyed steady growth of more than 20% in the last decade, outperforming ASICs and PDSPs by 10%. This comes from the fact that FPGAs have many features in common with ASICs, such as reduction in size, weight, and power dissipation, higher throughput, better security against unauthorized copies, reduced device and inventory cost, and reduced board test costs, and claim advantages over ASICs, such as a reduction in development time (rapid prototyping), in-circuit reprogrammability, lower NRE costs, resulting in more economical designs for solutions requiring less than 1000 units. Compared with PDSPs, FPGA design typically exploits parallelism, e.g., implementing multiple multiply-accumulate calls efficiency, e.g., zero product-terms are removed, and pipelining, i.e., each LE has a register, therefore pipelining requires no additional resources. Another trend in the DSP hardware design world is the migration from graphical design entries to hardware description language (HDL). Although many DSP algorithms can be described with “signal flow graphs,” it has been found that “code reuse” is much higher with HDL-based entries than with graphical design entries. There is a high demand for HDL design engineers and we already find undergraduate classes about logic design with HDLs [2]. Unfortunately two HDL languages are popular today. The US west coast and Asia area prefer Verilog, while US east coast and Europe more frequently
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