A wideband receiver digitises far more spectrum than any one signal occupies. Channelisation is how that capture becomes separate, individually usable channels.
The naive implementation is the reason this IP exists. Building a digital down-converter per channel — mixer, low-pass filter, decimator — costs N times one channel. Across dozens of carriers that is a device nobody budgeted for. A polyphase filter bank restructures the same operation so the filtering is shared and an FFT performs the frequency separation, and the cost then tracks total bandwidth rather than channel count.
The constraint that follows is that channel spacing and count are tied to the filter bank and transform size. Uniform channelisation is efficient and rigid; non-uniform plans and channels that must be contiguous without loss at the crossovers require oversampled configurations, which cost more and are the usual reason a channeliser is larger than first estimated.