The modular architecture of SYNTHUP, FPGA based PCI board for real-time sound synthesis and digital signal processing

Abstract

SYNTHUP is a standard PCI plug-in board based on Xilinx FPGAs. It has been designed at CEMAMu for real-time sound synthesis and can be used for general purpose digital signal processing. Its modular architecture features a PCI interface, seven identical cells dedicated to computing, each made-up of one FPGA that drives two independent 4M×16 SDRAM with separate address and data buses. An array of five FPGAs is dedicated to data exchange between the cells and also drives five 12 bit ports. An eight cell is used for processing control, synthesis parameters update for example. PCI bus mastering (scattergather DMA) and a total of 128M bytes of dual port SDRAM allow the synthesizer to function independently of the host. The paper introduces our first results in additive synthesis and the implementation of adaptive FIR filters with distributed arithmetic. © 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.