From the Beer, Coffee, and a little DSP » Blog Archive » Asterisk on an FPGA

Over the past couple of years a few people have suggested running Asterisk on an FPGA using an embedded processor core. I must admit I had always assumed that the processor would be too slow to be useful, certainly much slower than a regular embedded processor at the same price.

However my friend Stelios Koroneos and the team at Digital OPSiS have proved me wrong! They have managed to implement Asterisk on a Xilinx Virtex 4 FPGA, running a 300MHz Power PC core. These FPGAs cost about the same as an embedded processor, e.g. around $12 in Qty 1000.

I’ve been interested in FPGAs and Asterisk: it’s good to see projects that do both.