Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] HDTV and the USRP

[Eric Blossom]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 11:58:34PM -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
> At 09:20 PM 7/27/2004, Eric Blossom wrote:
> >We're interested in seeing what we can off-load into the FPGA, but for
> >Matt and I, it's a relatively low priority.  Others of course are free
> >to dive in and see what they can do.
> >
> >The FPGA we're using does not contain hardware multipliers, so some of
> >the signal processing is a bit of a challenge.
> 
> Wasn't one of the major requirements of the USRP to be able to handle these 
> computations?

No.

> Are there compatible FPGAs that can be dropped into the USRP 
> which have the multipliers?

If by "dropped in" you mean pin compatible, the answer is no.

The Cyclone II, due out next year, will have hardware multipliers, but
no 240 pin package.  The Xilinx Spartan3 is another possibility, but
when we looked they hadn't solved a reliability problem with the part.

Of course there are lots of parts with hardware multipliers.  
Most of them are quite expensive.

> steve 

Eric