FPGA vs. DSP Design Reliability and Maintenance

Digital signal processing (DSP) underpins modern wireless and wireline communications, medical diagnostic equipment, military systems, audio and video equipment, and countless other products, becoming increasingly common in consumers' lives. Due to advances in semiconductor technology, ever more complex DSP algorithms, protocols, and applications are now feasible, which, in turn, increase the complexity of the systems and products. As the complexity increases, the system reliability is no longer solely defined by the hardware platform reliability, typically quantified in mean time between failure (MTBF) calculations. System reliability is increasingly determined by hardware and software architecture, development and verification processes, and the level of design maintainability.