With their inherent flexibility, FPGAs are ideal for high-performance or multi-channel digital signal processing (DSP) applications that can take advantage of hardware parallelism to achieve a single-chip solution—all at a lower cost and power consumption than multi-DSP implementations.

The transition to FPGA-based DSP hardware from DSP processors can involve acquiring a new set of design skills and a new understanding of hardware. For developers new to FPGAs or to DSP, this change can become a significant undertaking, which adds risk to design schedules. This white paper shows how the Spartan®-6 and Virtex®-6 FPGA DSP kits are designed to ease FPGA adoption and enable algorithm and hardware developers to quickly begin developing DSP applications on Xilinx® devices. 

Xilinx FPGAs exceed the computational power of DSPs with their inherent parallelism, breaking the paradigm of sequential execution and accomplishing more per clock. Figure 1 shows why FPGAs are a popular choice for DSP hardware platforms when processing bandwidth requirements exceed 10 GMACs.