Can Soft microprocessor replace DSP's

[lordsathish]

Hi all....
Can Soft microprocessor like microblaze, nios replace DSP processors...?
Or is there any soft DSP processor...?
Thanks

 

[angelote]

In opencores.org there are DSP implementations.
uBlaze is only a processor, but you can add to it real DSP capabilities connecting a DSP core to the faster LMB bus.

 

[lordsathish]

Does that mean, we cant have a DSP soft processor running in an FPGA...?
Is this because an FPGA implementation cannot match the performance of an real DSP processor...?

 

[angelote]

Of course you can implement a DSP processor into an FPGA and make it work, but DSP processor on FPGA performance will be lower that the performance of a similar DSP chip.
DSP on FPGA is preferred when you have to do the same fixed process all the time. In that case you do not implement a DSP soft processor; intead of that, you implement a DSP algorithm using the FPGA DSP structures (take a look at DSP Design Tools from Xilinx, for example). In this case, FPGA performance will be higher than the performance of a DSP processor doing the same process.