Digital Signal Processing Applications

5.5 Summary

Digital signal processing has become a popular method for processing the signals we encounter in our daily lives and in other settings and reconfigurable computing has become a favorite technology for implementing DSP applications due to its flexibility and performance. The key to the performance of DSP applications on reconfigurable computers is the large amount of parallelism that can be exploited in these applications. Factors such as pipelining, small data widths, memory bandwidth, I/O bandwidth, and others help determine how much parallelism can be exploited and how efficiently the reconfigurable computing application operates.

We have also provided a small sampling of the wide variety of DSP operations and applications that have been developed using reconfigurable computing. Software radio using reconfigurable computing has been one active area of research and we expect the efficient use of reconfigurable computing for DSP to continue as an active research topic for some time.