Ron Warner
Lattice Semiconductor

Field programmable devices are continually being adopted in new market segments, where they are being implemented as mainstream logic devices. These new market segments are increasingly driving competing FPGA vendors to incorporate a wider variety of functionality and flexibility within their devices. Embedded digital signal processing (DSP) is one such function, addressing a wide gamut of market segments. In order to meet increasing market demands, these processing elements and their supporting hardware platforms must be able to provide increased calculation throughput without the expense of additional latency. For example, in 3G and 4G wireless applications, baseband and remote radio head (RRH) cards are required to handle both multiple protocols and increased throughput in order to support higher cellular data rates, even while maintaining a high Signal to Noise Ratio.