More MMACs! -- Alternatives to FPGAs

[ezalys]

I would like to ingest, mix, and filter data from a 40 MSPS DAC, as well as run an ADPLL to lock onto an incoming signal. In other words, I'd like to make a lockin amplifier.

Since FPGAs are so hard to get these days, I'm inclined to ask what else is on the market that can handle high speed DSP. About 5 years ago I would have looked at a Blackfin, but this seems to be dying. Are people using ARMs as high speed DSPs? What about just off the wall alternative architectures? I did some back of the envelope calculations and thought one of those Greenarrays CPUs might be kinda fun to try, but it seems too slow. There's also some new parts from XMOS that seem cool. Just for my own interest, what else is available that might be fun to try?

[uer166]

How many MACs do you actually need? The sample rate doesn't tell much since it depends on the filters/processing. Maybe look at some TI DSPs like TMS320C6655 and such, 40 GMACs per core per second, so that's like 1000 MACs per sample.

[fchk]

NVidia Jetson Modules have powerful GPUs with thousands of CUDA cores that all work in parallel. If your algoorithms can be vectorized this might be the way to go.

fchk

[ezalys]

Jetson looks neat but I don't think it has a particularly easy to talk to high speed I/O thing. Best I can imagine is hanging an FPGA off the PCI/e bus and now we're back to an FPGA.

[fchk]

Jetson looks neat but I don't think it has a particularly easy to talk to high speed I/O thing. Best I can imagine is hanging an FPGA off the PCI/e bus and now we're back to an FPGA.

1. PCIe Bridge, doesn't need to be an FPGA
https://www.broadcom.com/products/pcie-switches-bridges/pcie-bridges/pex8311

2. USB3
https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/universal-serial-bus-usb-power-delivery-controller/peripheral-controllers/ez-usb-fx3-superspeed-usb-3.0-peripheral-controller/?utm_source=cypress&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=202110_globe_en_all_integration-product_families

3. CSI2 with bridge