there is something called Software Defined Radio (SDR) which comes into play here. keep in mind, some components have to remain h/w while others are in s/w. there is a trade off.
in order to make use of the fpga by larger portions of the design community, there is a company that designs a development product for fpgas that make this possible. check out these guys; http://www.altium.com – they design this system for radid prototyping so that the developer of a new product can focus on the design task at hand, instead of being hung up on development issues, syntax issues, tool issues and the like. i will be getting this system as soon as i get back to being employed again; i’m one of the recently unemployed. this system costs about $400 – they give a pretty extensive video describing the system development components, i’m pumped to getting mine!
also too, with this h/w and associated control gui software on pc, the lines between h/w and s/w become fuzzy. this path is what microsoft wants to happen; connect everything everywhere; its part of what is called the ‘distributed computing model’. i focus my design efforts in automated test systems this way to push certain functionalities off to various device targets whose resources can handle said functions while leaving other functions appropriate to ‘enterprise’ based pcs there. the degree of ‘scalability’ of such systems has grown to the point that it is possible to implement your system in a very efficient and custom manner.
my two cents.
have a good day
Ron H.
Everett, WA