Terminology Tango 101
From Dog Gates to Marketing Megahertz

Pay attention now, there will be a quiz.

In today’s lesson, we’re going to pick the best FPGA. Well, more accurately, we’re going to learn how to pick the best FPGA. The actual proof will be left as an exercise for the student. Since we’re engineers, we can’t rely on any touchy-feely stuff. It doesn’t matter who has the coolest name. We don’t even care who’s got the slickest icon printed on top of their BGA packages. We need a formula. Once we’ve got the right formula, we can read the data sheets, plug in all the numbers and… voilà! The prince of programmability will leap from the page into our collective consciousness.

To build our formula we’re going to need terms. (Any good formula has them…) Since we always talk about gates, we should definitely have them as one of our terms. Everyone knows that gates are good, and, being good, go on the top of our equation. When the number of gates gets bigger, our “goodness” metric will get bigger.

Another thing that always comes up is cost. Cost is bad. We don’t want too much of it, and less is always better. We’ll slide cost in on the bottom of our equation. Now we’re getting somewhere! We’ve got both a numerator and a denominator and our magic metric is starting to take shape. [more]

High-Performance DSP Capability Within an Optimized Low-Cost FPGA Architecture
by Gordon Hands, Strategic Marketing Manager, Lattice Semiconductor Corporation

The applications of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) continue to expand, driven by trends such as the increased use of video and still images and the demand for increasingly reconfigurable systems such as Software Defined Radio (SDR). Many of these applications combine the need for significant DSP processing with cost sensitivity, creating demand for high-performance, low-cost DSP solutions.

General-purpose DSP chips and FPGAs are two common methods of implementing DSP functions, although, until now, the choice of an FPGA implementation has been limited to high-end, expensive platforms. Each approach has advantages, and the optimum implementation method will vary depending upon application requirements. This article provides an overview of common DSP functions and explores the differences between general purpose DSPs and FPGAs. This is followed by a description of the optimized, low-cost LatticeECP-DSP™ FPGA architecture, and a comparison of the LatticeECP-DSP to existing FPGA solutions. [more]