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FPGA synth question

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Topic: FPGA synth question

Posted By: Ajay
Subject: FPGA synth question
Date Posted: February 05 2013 at 05:36

Field-programmable gate arrays would seem to be teh hotness in synth-building projects these days.

Could someone please explain to me the advantages of a FPGA synth, other than that the circuits are relatively low-cost, hackable, and non-analog?

Yes, I Googled. Thanks.

Replies:

Posted By: engineer
Date Posted: March 27 2013 at 12:55

FPGAs for instance can emulate analog behaviour with a finer resolution than DSPs (some ns) overcoming the limits of the sample rate and it's granularity. The output does not necessarily have to be 192kHz, but can be much higher directly driving the AA filter with some MHz -> less tradeoff regarding the edge frequency and non linearity of the the anti aliasing filter, but the advantage is small only. The available resources are better invested into the number of voices.

The biggest advantage of FPGAs is pipelined processing, when used correctly. A current FPGA runs on e.g. 200 MHz and produces around >4000 channels for sample rate of 48kHz. To use 192kHz DACs, e.g. 1024 channel are processed during one sample period.

My current synth offers in double structure 8192 voices. You might get impression here:

http://www.96khz.org/oldpages/vamodelling2.htm" rel="nofollow - http://www.96khz.org/oldpages/vamodelling2.htm