The soft-core discrete-time signal processor peripheral [Applications Corner]

With SoC systems, there is a growing need for modest performance, low-cost solutions that make minimum use of FPGA resources and make the most effective use of the features in an FPGA. For such systems, it can be undesirable to provide an entire digital signal processing (DSP) core either on the same die or in a separate package. This article contends that for products having such modest signal processing requirements, the FPGA provides an ideal means to customize a peripheral in a system to the given application. To exemplify this point, two examples utilizing a discrete time signal processing (DTSP) toolkit are presented.