Shipments of DSP boards with FPGAs to increase

Shipments of merchant digital signal processing (DSP) boards are expected to increase at a 1.9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2003 to 2008, according to a new study, “Digital Signal Processing (DSP): Global Market Demand Analysis,” by Venture Development Corp. (VDC).

However, when these results are divided by type of processing method, VDC reports that unit shipments of boards using DSPs alone are projected to decline slightly, posting a -0.2% CAGR from shipping 59,600 boards in 2003 to shipping a projected 59,100 board in 2008.

Meanwhile, shipments of boards that include DSPs combined with field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are expected to increase at a 4.3% CAGR from shipping 47,400 boards in 2003 to 58,400 boards in 2008. These results would more than offset the decline among traditional DSP boards.

“FPGAs and traditional DSPs are not competing technologies, but actually complement one another,” says Eric Gulliksen, VDC’s embedded hardware practice director. “Each has its own strong points. DSP are most appropriate for relatively complex tasks with limited bandwidth requirements, while FPGAs may be partitioned and programmed to perform simple, repetitive tasks in parallel when high bandwidth is required.”

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