On 07/26/2018 01:11 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
even though i have never myself developed anything for any FPGA (i come from the time of PALs), i still think the non-recurring engineering costs (NRE) is much higher for FPGA than with an off-the-shelf CPU or DSP.
FPGA implementations of DSP algorithms don't have to be significantly more troublesome than a CPU/DSP implementation. If you've got an experienced HDL designer with a good war chest of applicable IP to bring then these kinds of things can be done fairly quickly. On the other hand if you try to throw an FPGA design task at an engineer who's not familiar with the tools & techniques then you'll quickly learn what failure tastes like.
The biggest problem I've seen is that FPGA vendors try to sell their parts and toolchains into organizations that have little to no experience with such designs. They come in with a slick story about how you can build systems without actually understanding the underlying technology and then project managers get the idea that they can hand the task off to, say, a C++ programmer with no hardware chops. That rarely ends well.
Eric _______________________________________________ dupswapdrop: music-dsp mailing list [email protected] https://lists.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/music-dsp
