1. Summer Research Progress: Week 2 – DSP vs FPGA
Ross Keyes, Ajo Maret
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Temple University
URL: 1

2. FPGA Specifications Spartan - 3A Family:
Very low cost, high-performance logic solution for high-volume consumer-oriented applications.
Up to 519 I/O pins Mb/s data transfer rate per I/O.
DDR/DDR2 SDRAM support up to 400 Mb/s
Programmable input delays for finer timing control.
Up to 373 Kbits of efficient distributed RAM
IEEE1149.1/1532JTAG programming/debug port
Wide frequency range (5 MHz to over 300 MHz)
Complete Xilinx ISE and WebPACK development system support
Fully compliant 32-/64-bit 66 MHz PCI support

3. Design Flow (FPGA) Hardware in the loop Binary Data Binary Data MATLAB
Simulink & SysGen
Simulink & SysGen
FPGA

4. FPGA software Xilinx ISE Design Suit 11.1
The ISE Design Suite 11.1 sets new industry standard for delivering FPGA design tools and intellectual property to embedded, DSP and logic designers.
In our case we use a specific Xilinx Design Tool-kit known as the DSP Tool-kit which comprises of the System Generator (Simulink)
The XtremeDSP Starter Kit – Spartan 3A DSP Edition cost from $600- $2000+

5. Sample Code (Matlab Code):

6. System Generator (Simulink) Flow-Diagram:

7. DSP Specifications Chip: Fabricated on 0.09 µm technology.
Can operate at up to 120 MHz
Can use as low as 0.14 mW/MHz
320 KB RAM built in
Pins: 196
Board:
Embedded USB XDS100 JTAG emulator
TI TLV320AIC3204C Stereo Codec (stereo in, headphone out)
512K-bit EEPROM

8. Process is similar to running on a microprocessor.
Design Flow (DSP)
Process is similar to running on a microprocessor.
Binary Data
Binary Data
DSP
C Code

9. DSP software TI Code Composer Studio v4 Based on the Eclipse IDE
Built in C compiler
Full version is free as long a board with the USB XDS100 JTAG emulator is being used (software would normally cost $1895)
Can single step through DSP assembly code as well as C code.

10. Software Issues
The Xilinx ISE software that includes System Generator is very bulky.
Downloading and extracting the software takes hours.
Installing software also takes hours.
Each version of System Generator will only work with two or three versions of MATLAB
Fortunately Dr. Silage had extra Xilinx licenses that he was willing to spare.