COP: DSP boards, FPGA

COP: DSP boards, FPGA
The goal of this section is to cover any DSP COP, with a footprint different from a chip. The two main candidates are boards and FPGA. While FPGA are chips, the very large FPGA are more like boards in terms of price, flexibility and topology. Also they are direct competitors in the PC SOC socket. 

Background

Sometimes in the 90s plug-in dsp boards become coprocessor boards. In a terminology which was largely marketing, a dsp board for the VME bus was called a plug-in but the same board with degraded performance for the ISA bus was a COP board.[ref 1,2,3,4]

Description

PC coprocessing socket
One of the most interesting DSP Application of recent years was financial coprocessor. Intel architecture allows adding a COP on a very tightly coupled interface.  A couple of people [ref 5,6] used this socket to put a board which boils down to 1 or several higest end FPGAs. For the record what is accelerated is effectively some Matlab functions.
Embedded coprocessing
Also in the embedded world, a FPGA + C64xx is a standard sight. For instance in general purpose boards or wireless infrastructure. While a part of the  FPGA is for jelly beans an even larger part takes care of pre/post processing. Also nore that the C64xx does not support specifically for coprocessors. 


References                                                                                                                                      

1. " Plug-in DSP boards" EDN April 26, 1990
2. "DSP coprocessor boards" EDN Sep 13, 1991
3. "DSP boards help tackle a tough class of AI tasks" electronics, aug 21,1986
4. G.Pawle, T.Faherty "DSP development board offers host independence" computer design october15,1984
5. Nallatech
6. HC 2009??