DSP soft processors

I have seen one or two, but it was a long time ago. People doing DSP on FPGAs prefer implementing the function directly in hardware as it's much faster and more cost-effective.

Leon

Why?

If you have DSP function to perform, do it in hardware, it is much faster and consumes less power. Otherwise, use a dedicated DSP microprocessor...again, far faster and consumes less power, and more supportable.

I thought the tool flows supported this now, but via the DSP blocks ?

-ie rather than a separate 'core', you compile what you want, into as many DSP Cells as you need ? A Soft-DSP will never be as fast as a dedicated device, the key in FPGA is to spawn DSP in parallel and in HW. Check with Altera, Lattice, Xilinx...

-jg

For a topical update on this, check Xilinx website news on their purchase of AccelChip.

As you can see, these newest tool flows somewhat side-step the need for DSP Cores, per-se.

-jg