A comparison of micro-DSP and Silicon compiler implementations of a polyphase network filter bank

We report a comparison between two approaches to DSP system implementation. One implementation is based around an array of standard DSP microprocessors (Texas Instruments TMS32010); the other uses a silicon compiler (FIRST). The former work was carried out at ESTEC, the latter at the University of Edinburgh. The system under study is a 32- channel polyphase network filterbank operating on input data at 1.28MHz, demanding some 30 million multiplications/sec.