International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing
Volume 2009 (2009), Article ID 703267, 14 pages
doi:10.1155/2009/703267
Research Article

Architectural Synthesis of Fixed-Point DSP Datapaths Using FPGAs

Gabriel Caffarena,1 Juan A. López,1 Gerardo Leyva,2 Carlos Carreras,1 and Octavio Nieto-Taladriz1

1Departamento de Ingeniería Electrónica, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Ciudad Universitaria s/n, 28040 Madrid, Spain
2Departamento de Sistemas Electrónicos, Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes, Ciudad Universitaria s/n, 20100 Aguascalientes, Mexico

Received 25 February 2009; Accepted 28 August 2009

Academic Editor: Cesar Torres

Copyright © 2009 Gabriel Caffarena et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We address the automatic synthesis of DSP algorithms using FPGAs. Optimized fixed-point implementations are obtained by means of considering (i) a multiple wordlength approach; (ii) a complete datapath formed of wordlength-wise resources (i.e., functional units, multiplexers, and registers); (iii) an FPGA-wise resource usage metric that enables an efficient distribution of logic fabric and embedded DSP resources. The paper shows (i) the benefits of applying a multiple wordlength approach to the implementation of fixed-point datapaths and (ii) the benefits of a wise use of embedded FPGA resources. The use of a complete fixed-point datapath leads to improvements up to 35%. And, the wise mapping of operations to FPGA resources (logic fabric and embedded blocks), thanks to the proposed resource usage metric, leads to improvements up to 54%.