I have been looking at SDR's and I see many ppl using FPGA instead of DSP's to do much of the SDR work.
eg. the Digimit @ h**p://microlet.com/yam/
I know very little about FPGA... surely it is more complex to do say ssb demodulation using VHDL than coding in C for DSP? Or do you get libraries that already have most of the functions precoded?
You can use IP cores that are developed for FPGA implementation. Many companies offer such IP cores for the wireless and telecommunication application domain. For example, you can use Xilinx SystemGenerator to generate a netlist for FPGA implementation from a model specified by using Matlab/Simulink.