Keynote Speech Abstract

DSP offers what appear to be mystical solutions to historically intractable problems resulting in major new market opportunities. For example we now regularly send 56,000 data bits per second over an irregular channel sampled at 8000 samples per second and at prices that serve the consumer market. But past successes are fostering increasing demands.

The market forces that demand more performance can be seen in our everyday life. We expect everything to happen instantaneously whether it is access to a sea of information over the Internet or the processing of images from our digital camera. Applications from military radios to office automation equipment need high performance digital signal processing.

Shrinking product life cycles and faster time-to-market demands make the flexibility of programmable DSP solutions more desirable. It is now commonplace for a design to be obsoleted by new and better signal processing techniques even before the design reaches volume production. Now, advances in IC process technology, DSP algorithms, and design tools make FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) a viable option for extending the performance of traditional programmable DSP processors, yielding a flexible solution that addresses new market needs in applications such as data communications and image processing.

For over ten years the academic community has been looking at configurable computing - the application of programmable logic to implement high-speed algorithms. Parallel signal processing algorithms have been identified that have efficient implementations in FPGAs. Today FPGAs implement MAC intensive narrow band filters at data sample rates above 100 MHz. A channelizer function for Internet over coax processes billions of multiply accumulates per second in a single FPGA that costs less than $25. The use of parameterizable FPGA modules to implement standard DSP functions and the integration of DSP system level tools and FPGA implementations tools is bringing this technology to more engineers.

This talk addresses how signal processing is implemented in programmable logic. These new methods of achieving higher performance and greater flexibility using sophisticated DSP development tools will have a major impact on new markets such as satellite communications, wireless communications infrastructure, high speed digital subscriber loops, and medical imaging.

Last Update:  February 4, 1999         Ingo Höntsch