ABSTRACT
In recent years, FPGAs have become a fundamental component in implementing high-performance digital signal processing (DSP) systems, especially in the areas of digital communications, networking, and video. The logic fabric of FPGAs consists not only of
lookup tables, registers, multiplexers, and memory, but also dedicated circuitry for fast adders, multipliers, and I/O processing. The memory of a FPGA is more than that of a microprocessor or DSP processor, but DSP runs at clock rates 2 to 10 times that of the FPGA. With the capability for implementing high arithmetic architectures, this makes the FPGA ideally suited for creating high-performance custom data path processors for tasks such as digital filtering, fast Fourier transforms, and forward error correction. A third-generation (3G) wireless base station typically contains FPGAs and ASICs (applicationspecific integrated circuits) in addition to microprocessors and DSPs.
