November 2013 Altera Corporation DSP Builder Handbook
Volume 1: Introduction to DSP Builder
1. Introducing DSP Design
This chapter introduces DSP Builder for implementing digital signal processing (DSP)
designs on Altera
FPGAs.
DSP Systems in FPGAs
The DSP market includes the following rapidly evolving applications, which cover a
broad spectrum of performance and cost requirements:
■ 3G wireless
■ Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP)
■ Multimedia systems
■ Radar and satellite systems
■ Medical systems
■ Image-processing applications
■ Consumer electronics.
Specialized DSP processors can implement many of these applications. Although
these DSP processors are programmable through software, their hardware
architecture is not flexible. Therefore, fixed hardware architecture such as bus
performance bottlenecks, a fixed number of multiply accumulate (MAC) blocks, fixed
memory, fixed hardware accelerator blocks, and fixed data widths limit DSP
processors. The DSP processor’s fixed hardware architecture is not suitable for some
applications that require customized DSP function implementations.
FPGAs provide a reconfigurable solution for implementing DSP applications, higher
DSP throughput, and more raw data processing power than DSP processors. Because
you can reconfigure FPGAs, they offer complete hardware customization while
implementing various DSP applications. You can customize the architecture, bus
structure, memory, hardware accelerator blocks, and the number of MAC blocks in an
FPGA system.
FPGA Architecture Features
You can configure FPGAs to operate in different modes corresponding to a required
functionality. You can use a suitable hardware description language (HDL) such as
VHDL or Verilog HDL to implement any hardware design. Thus, the same FPGA can
implement a DSL router, a DSL modem, a JPEG encoder, a digital broadcast system, or
a backplane switch fabric interface.
High-density FPGAs incorporate embedded silicon features that can implement
complete systems inside an FPGA, creating a system on a programmable chip (SOPC)
implementation. Embedded silicon features such as embedded memory, DSP blocks,
and embedded processors are ideally suited for implementing DSP functions such as
finite impulse response (FIR) filters, fast Fourier transforms (FFTs), correlators,
equalizers, encoders, and decoders.
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