Performance analysis of microcontroller and FPGA based Signal Processing a case study on FIR filter design and implementation

Embedded Computing platforms based on Microcontroller, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and Digital Signal Processor (DSP) are subjects of interest at Under Graduate(UG) and Post Graduate(PG) levels in Electronics and Communication Engineering. Real Time Signal Processing algorithms are generally implemented on any one of these platforms. The paper presents a comparative performance analysis between Microcontroller and FPGA based signal processing by way of a case study on Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter implementation. Microcontrollers are basically sequential and FPGAs are parallel computing platforms. This paper highlights the parallelism feature of FPGA to prove its efficiency against Microcontroller for signal processing applications.