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This year at the International Conference on Acoustics and Signal Processing (ICASSP) held in Phoenix Arizona, the Xilinx CEO, Wim Roelandts presented the opening keynote speech to a audience of over 1,500 DSP professionals from industry and the academic community. The speech entitled "IC Technology Enables New Programmable DSP Solutions" explained how semiconductor process technology is molding the way signal processing applications are being implemented. Engineers no longer have to choose between the performance limitations of DSP processors and inflexibility of custom ICs. Today Virtex FPGAs deliver a flexible DSP solution with performance comparable to a custom IC. The FPGA DSP roadmap surprised the audience with projections of "two billion MACs for a dollar" within four years. Moore’s law has accurately predicted the massive IC capacity increases and FPGAs offer a way for DSP designers to harness this power. When this programmable performance is applied to high-speed communications applications new technical solutions and new business models emerge. Fully programmable solutions for wireless infrastructure are now possible and with IRL tools (Internet Reconfigurable Logic) it is possible to upgrade an entire wireless communications system with a single network command. DSP performance benchmarks for communications and image processing were presented as examples of actual FPGA applications that deliver up to 28 billion multiply accumulate operations per second in a single Virtex FPGA device. A copy of Wim’s ICASSP presentation is available for viewing Xilinx 1999 Tradeshow Schedule
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