Erasing the Asterisk
Xilinx Boosts DSP Design with AccelChip

For years, we’ve talked about how FPGAs have the potential to accelerate digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms, producing higher performance with lower cost and lower power consumption than traditional DSP processors*. Whoa! Did you see that - the asterisk at the end of that claim? It’s true, though. Using the parallel computing capability of a typical DSP-enabled FPGA (one with hardware multipliers, MACs, or DSP accelerators) you can get tens to hundreds of times the throughput of a DSP processor running the same algorithm in compiled C code*. Hey! There it was again!

That little asterisk, it turns out, is probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year in silicon revenue. The footnote that always links to that asterisk says something like “FPGA-based DSP is tens to hundreds of times more difficult to design and implement than processor-based DSP.” Ouch.
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Beverly Hills 802.16
WiMAX, You da MAN

You know what they say about technophiles: Give us a wireless inch and we’ll take a wireless mile. Actually, make that a wireless metropolitan area network. It seems like only yesterday that we were content, even ecstatic, with a wireless network in our homes. Then we said, “Hey, if only we could use our wireless technology while drinking coffee in a small cafe, our lives would be complete.” Once we got a taste of non-fat, grande, double-shot Internet espresso, we wanted to put our coffee in a to-go cup, move our laptop applications to our phones (which have suddenly become curiously large again), and roam around town, sipping and surfing on the run. And lately, we’re wondering why we can’t bring broadband access with us when we go, well, anywhere. To recap, we were happy with a wireless PAN, then we wanted a wireless LAN, then we simply had to have a wireless MAN, and now, frankly, we see no reason why we can’t have a wireless WAN.
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