Complementary Co-processing Functions for DSP

Xilinx FPGAs also complement traditional DSP processors in many ways:

• Bridging multiple buses such as Serial RapidIO™ and PCI Express®
• Connect to external memories with popular interfaces like DDR and DDR2
• Connect directly to DSP processors via EMIF, VLYNQ or Serial RapidIO™ interfaces
• Connect A/Ds to FPGAs using parallel interfaces such as LVDS or LVTTL
• Consolidate system logic and reduce the bill of materials in your system by integrating all your system logic into the FPGA
• Implement new peripherals for your processor
• Accelerate performance in the signal chain

Manage highly complex signal processing algorithms by combining our FPGAs with your existing DSP solution. With FPGAs as co-processors, you can implement highly parallel architectures for applications with sample rates of hundreds of mega samples per second. The implicit software-based approach of programmable DSP also allows for a high degree of flexibility and shortened design and testing times.

Video and Image Processing

The high-performance advantage of FPGAs can extend capabilities of DSP processors in multiple dimensions. For example, a standalone H.264 baseline video encoder (VGA) for a videophone consumes 70% of the available DSP cycles in a DM642/64x (600 MHz). You can achieve higher rates and resolution using an FPGA to offload more computation-intensive tasks such as motion prediction and deblocking.

Digital Communications

In high performance digital communications systems such as software defined radios, FPGAs perform many complementary functions such as multi-channel digital down/up conversion, matched filtering, crest factor reduction, digital predistortion and handle chip rate processing in the baseband card too. DSP processors are used for handling lower sample rate tasks such as symbol encoding and decoding.

Design Tools and Processes for Co-Processor Development

Our complete development process for rapidly designing and deploying XtremeDSP™ solutions with FPGA co-processors includes hardware and software development tools for modeling the FPGA-DSP system, designing the FPGA without knowing HDL, developing algorithms, and working through debug analysis, optimization, and testing.

DSP Development Platforms from Third Parties

Many Xilinx Global Alliance Program members offer co-processing hardware boards. While Xilinx recognizes that these partners offer third party platforms for signal processing, we do not validate the function of these platforms.