Re-configurable DSP Processor - A New Computing Platform for Software Radio Applications

Recently, a new Computing platform "Configurable Architecture" that combines programmable hardware with programmable processors to capitalize on the strengths of hardware and software, has emerged as a potential alternative to the conventional Von-Newman architecture. Due to the advent of dynamically re-configurable FPGAs as high performance, flexible, scalable and programmable hardware, it has been made possible to visualize "Reconfigurable Architecture" for compute intensive DSP applications. This paper aims to introduce a generalized architecture of a reconfigurable DSP processor and explores the possibility of implementing such an architecture using state-of-the-art FPGAs for Software Radio application which needs high performance and flexibility.