High Performance Digital Signal Processing

Recent improvements in the speed and complexity of commercially available digital signal processing (DSP) devices have allowed digital techniques to be extended to a number of new areas. Now many applications in RF and communications are within the bandwidth capability of current generation DSP systems. This paper demonstrates a system developed recently for such applications. It uses standard PC bus architectures and interface chipsets, together with commercially available analogue-to-digital converters (ADCs), digital-to-analogue converters (DACs), and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), to realise wide bandwidth, high performance systems at relatively low cost. The system outlined provides multiple independent communications processing channels, each with in excess of 100 MSPS real time bandwidth. Analogue interfaces are provided via ADCs and DACs and the module supports frequency domain processing via real time forward, inverse fast fourier transforms (FFTs) and various matrix manipulation algorithms. An industry standard peripheral component interface (PCI) is also implemented on the system, so that raw or processed time-series and/or frequency domain data can be examined and displayed as required, using a standard personal computers (PCs). This PC interfacing also provides the necessary hooks for simple adaptive processing on the high speed data stream.