Slide 5 of 22 Notes: 

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Then in the mid 90s a new phenomena immerged. FPGA implement custom data path DSP function just like a custom IC but are standard products customized by the user.

An efficient way to implement multiply-accumulate operations using the FPGAsâ 4 input look-up tables was found. They can implement many multiply accumulate operations in parallel. Faster and cheaper FIR filters were the first DSP applications implemented in FPGAs.

Over the last 5 years FPGAs dramatically increased in speed and capacity, software tools were developed to simplify the implementation of DPS building blocks and new FPGA architectures supported the use of standard hardware design languages (VHDL, Verilog) for DSP designs.

FPGAs now offer similar performance to a custom hardware solution with the flexibility of a programmable processor solution.