mparison is between FPGAs and ASICs. In this field it is clear that the FPA will always have worse performances due to the specific optimization of a well- designed ASIC. On the other hand, carrying out an FPGA project can be 10 times less expensive with respect to an ASIC project and the final ASIC, once in production, has a Telecommunication Networks High level C programming on CPU 8 x 8k 128 x 512 512x128 32 x 2k 256 x 256 2kx 32 Matrix dimension FIGURE 5.48 Example of performance evaluation of a programmed FPGA in the task of executing linear operations on arrays and vectors. (After Kestur, S. et al., BLAS comparison on FPGA, CPU and GPU [a cura di], IEEE Computer Society, Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI), 2010, IEEE, s.l., pp. 288-293, 2010.) competitive price only if produced in very large volumes, which is not the case generally for telecommunications This consideration often leads designers to use FPGAs instead of ASICS every time the required performances allow it. 5.7.4 Digital Signal Processor A DSP is a particular type of CPU optimized to run real-time digital processing algo- rithms like fast Fourier transform (FFT), digital filtering, digital correlation, and SO on. In order to do that, a DSP is realized with a set of hardware-implemented functions that are suitable for the target of the processor, while generally the configuration inter- faces are not SO powerful as those of a standard CPU, since a DSP is not built to change continuously the program in order to carry out a large variety of tasks (as a standard computer does), but to execute on a high-speed transit signal a well-defined set of opera- tions that perhaps will be programmed at the beginning of the DSP's life and will never change. Due to their design target, DSPs are used almost always as local controllers or equaliz- ers, and the telecommunication application is not an exception. For convenience, DSP processors can be divided into two broad categories: 1. General-purpose DSP processors: These are basically high-speed microprocessors 