[hpsdr] openHPSDR at the forefront of SDR development

[Steven B. Dick]

Hi Joe. Certainly verilog or VHDL FPGA coding can be learned by anyone with
a desire to learn and my hat is off to you for taking it upon yourself to
learn both firmware and software programming. That was not the point I was
trying to make.  In my previous life, I was a digital design manager.  FPGA
code designed by experienced senior FPGA designers took a lot more time to
develop (even worse to maintain) compared to software written by experienced
software developers which ran on general purpose compute nodes.  For many
years, FPGA designs had an important role to play where special functions
just could not be done in general purpose processors or even DSP processors
with comparable performance, but one willingly paid for it in reaping the
benefits of high performance and/or greatly reduced hardware footprint.  But
the processing landscape is changing nowadays with very low cost processing
platforms based on multiple node graphics engines coupled with high order
language support with DSP libraries.  Use of these platforms is starting to
result in huge performance capabilities in a low cost rapid development
environment if these platforms can be readily used for particular
applications including the FFT function.

Regards,
"Digital Steve", K1RF     

-----Original Message-----
From: Joe Martin K5SO [mailto:k5so at valornet.com] 
Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2014 2:06 PM
To: Rob Crewson
Cc: 'Steven B. Dick'; hpsdr at lists.openhpsdr.org
Subject: Re: [hpsdr] openHPSDR at the forefront of SDR development

A personal comment regarding FPGA programming and programming in general: 

The view that writing and maintaining FPGA code is beyond the capability of
most of us has been blown completely out of proportion to reality!  That
view is simply incorrect.

Indeed, I'm a good example of the point, I think. 


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