Hi,

I am reading Uwe Meter-Baese's book "DSP with FPGAs" and am trying to gain
some perspective here. FWIW, I develop embedded apps on the Atmel 8 bit AVR
platform with CodeVision C compiler.

What are the pros and cons of going PDSPs vs. FPGAs to implement DSP for my
8 bit apps?

This book favors Altera and VHDL ( which I don't even know)

Help me out here...

Hello!,
The book you are reading is the best of the best in that topic. The
question about pros and cons is a hot question til now. You'll find
people that will like more PDSPs than FPGAs. To me there are a couple
things to take in consideration. 1.- Paralellism. If your algorithm is
such that you can divide it in small parts to execute it in parallel,
them FPGA is great.
2.- Custom precision. If you need to work with an specific number of
bits, say 17 (whatever), then is better to implement it on FPGA than a
PDSP since you won't find one with the precision you want.
3.- However, if you don't need that much speed, or an special
requirement on precision, then use PDSP, it's easier and probably
cheaper.

In general, I'll use FPGA when my application is very demanding in
terms of speed and customization. If not, it is probably cheaper and
easier to use a PDSP.

hope it helps,
alnz.

"Orbit" <o...@dunno.net> wrote in message
news:<m...@giganews.com>...
> Hi,
> 
> I am reading Uwe Meter-Baese's book "DSP with FPGAs" and am trying to gain
> some perspective here. FWIW, I develop embedded apps on the Atmel 8 bit AVR
> platform with CodeVision C compiler.
> 
> What are the pros and cons of going PDSPs vs. FPGAs to implement DSP for my
> 8 bit apps?
> 
> This book favors Altera and VHDL ( which I don't even know)
> 
> Help me out here...