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The use of reconfigurable field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for imaging applications show considerable promise to fill the gap that often occurs when digital signal processor chips fail to meet performance specifications. Single chip DSPs do not have the overall performance to meet the needs of many imaging applications, particularly in real-time designs. Using multiple DSPs to boost performance often presents major design challenges in maintaining data alignment and process synchronization. These challenges can impose serious cost, power consumption and board space penalties. Image processing requires manipulating massive amounts of data at high-speed. Although DSP chips can process data at high-speeds, their architectures can inhibit overall system performance in real-time imaging. The rate of operations can be increased when they are performed in dedicated hardware, such as special-purpose imaging devices and FPGAs, which provides the horsepower necessary to implement real-time image processing products successfully and cost-effectively. For many fixed applications, non-SRAM- based (antifuse or flash-based) FPGAs provide the raw speed to accomplish standard high-speed functions. However, in applications where algorithms are continuously changing and compute operations must be modified, only SRAM-based FPGAs give enough flexibility. The addition of reconfigurable FPGAs as a flexible hardware facility enables DSP chips to perform optimally. The benefits primarily stem from optimizing the hardware for the algorithms or the use of reconfigurable hardware to enhance the product architecture. And with SRAM-based FPGAs that are capable of partial dynamic reconfiguration, such as the Cache-Logic FPGAs from Atmel, continuous modification of data and logic is not only possible, it is practical as well. First we review the particular demands of image processing. Then we present various applications and discuss strategies for exploiting the capabilities of reconfigurable FPGAs along with DSPs. We describe the benefits of a compute-oriented FPGA architecture and how partial dynamic reconfiguration delivers unprecedented capabilities for imaging systems and products.
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