An Architecture for On board Frequency Domain Analysis of Launch Vehicle Vibration Signals

The dynamic properties of the airborne structures plays a crucial role in the stability of the vehicle during flight. Modal and spectral behaviour of the structures are simulated and analysed. Ground tests are carried out with environmental conditions close to the flight conditions, with some assumptions. Subsequently, based on the flight telemetered data, the on-board mission algorithm and the auto-pilot filter coefficients are fine tuned. An attempt is made in this paper to design a novel architecture for analysing the modal and spectral random vibration signals on-board the flight vehicle and to identify the dominant frequencies. Based on the analysed results, the mission mode algorithm and the filter coefficients can be fine tuned on-board for better effectiveness in control and providing more stability. Three types of windows viz. Hann, Hamming and Blackman-Harris are configured with a generalised equation using FIR filter structure. The overlapping of the input signal data for better inclusiveness of the real-time data is implemented with BRAM. The domain conversion of the data from time domain to frequency domain is carried out with FFT using Radix-2 BF architecture. The FFT output data are processed for calculating the power spectral density. The dominant frequency is identified using the array search method and Goldschmidt algorithm is utilised for the averaging of the PSDs for better precision. The proposed architecture is synthesised, implemented and tested with both Synthetic and doppler signal of 300 Hz spot frequency padded with Gaussian white noise. The results are highly satisfactory in identifying the spot frequency and generating the PSD array

Efficient FPGA implementation of high-throughput mixed radix multipath delay commutator FFT processor for MIMO-OFDM

This article presents and evaluates pipelined architecture designs for an improved high-frequency Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) processor implemented on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) for Multiple Input Multiple Output Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM). The architecture presented is a Mixed-Radix Multipath Delay Commutator. The presented parallel architecture utilizes fewer hardware resources compared to Radix-2 architecture, while maintaining simple control and butterfly structures inherent to Radix-2 implementations. The high-frequency design presented allows enhancing system throughput without requiring additional parallel data paths common in other current approaches, the presented design can process two and four independent data streams in parallel and is suitable for scaling to any power of two FFT size N. FPGA implementation of the architecture demonstrated significant resource efficiency and high-throughput in comparison to relevant current approaches within literature. The proposed architecture designs were realized with Xilinx System Generator (XSG) and evaluated on both Virtex-5 and Virtex-7 FPGA devices. Post place and route results demonstrated maximum frequency values over 400 MHz and 470 MHz for Virtex-5 and Virtex-7 FPGA devices respectively

Design and Evaluation of a Scalable Engine for 3D-FFT Computation in an FPGA Cluster

The Three Dimensional Fast Fourier Transform (3D-FFT) is commonly used to solve the partial differential equations describing the system evolution in several physical phenomena, such as the motion of viscous fluids described by the Navier–Stokes equations. Simulation of such problems requires the use of a parallel High-Performance Computing architecture since the size of the problem grows with the cube of the FFT size, and the representation of the single point comprises several double precision floating- point complex numbers. Modern High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems are considering the inclusion of FPGAs as components of this computing architecture because they can combine effective hardware acceleration capabilities and dedicated communication facilities. Furthermore, the network topology can be optimized for the specific calculation that the cluster must perform, especially in the case of algorithms limited by the data exchange delay between the processors. In this paper, we explore an HPC design that uses FPGA accelerators to compute the 3DFFT. We devise a scalable FFT engine based on a custom radix-2 double-precision core that is used to implement the Decimation in Frequency version of the Cooley–Tukey FFT algorithm. The FFT engine can be adapted to different technology constraints and networking topologies by adjusting the number of cores and configuration parameters in order to minimize the overall calculation time. We compare the various possible configurations with the technological limits of available hardware. Finally, we evaluate the bandwidth required for continuous FFT execution in the APEnet toroidal mesh network

FPGA Implementation of Fast Fourier Transform Core Using NEDA

Transforms like DFT are a major block in communication systems such as OFDM, etc. This thesis reports architecture of a DFT core using NEDA. The advantage of the proposed architecture is that the entire transform can be implemented using adder/subtractors and shifters only, thus minimising the hardware requirement compared to other architectures. The proposed design is implemented for 16-bit data path (12–bit for comparison) considering both integer representation as well as fixed point representation, thus increasing the scope of usage. The proposed design is mapped on to Xilinx XC2VP30 FPGA, which is fabricated using 130 nm process technology. The maximum on board frequency of operation of the proposed design is 122 MHz. NEDA is one of the techniques to implement many signal processing systems that require multiply and accumulate units. FFT is one of the most employed blocks in many communication and signal processing systems. The FPGA implementation of a 16 point radix-4 complex FFT is proposed. The proposed design has improvement in terms of hardware utilization compared to traditional methods. The design has been implemented on a range of FPGAs to compare the performance. The maximum frequency achieved is 114.27 MHz on XC5VLX330 FPGA and the maximum throughput, 1828.32 Mbit/s and minimum slice delay product, 9.18. The design is also implemented using synopsys DC synthesis in both 65 nm and 180 nm technology libraries. The advantages of multiplier-less architectures are reduced hardware and improved latency. The multiplier-less architectures for the implementation of radix-2^2 folded pipelined complex FFT core are based on NEDA. The number of points considered in the work is sixteen and the folding is done by a factor of four. The proposed designs are implemented on Xilinx XC5VSX240T FPGA. Proposed designs based on NEDA have reduced area over 83%. The observed slice-delay product for NEDA based designs are 2.196 and 5.735

VLSI Architecture for Polar Codes Using Fast Fourier Transform-Like Design

Polar code is a novel and high-performance communication algorithm with the ability to theoretically achieving the Shannon limit, which has attracted increasing attention recently due to its low encoding and decoding complexity. Hardware optimization further reduces the cost and achieves better timing performance enabling real-time applications on resource-constrained devices. This thesis presents an area-efficient architecture for a successive cancellation (SC) polar decoder. Our design applies high-level transformations to reduce the number of Processing Elements (PEs), i.e., only log2 N pre-computed PEs are required in our architecture for an N-bit code. We also propose a customized loop-based shifting register to reduce the consumption of the delay elements further. Our experimental results demonstrate that our architecture reduces 98.90% and 93.38% in the area and area-time product, respectively, compared to prior works

Architectural implementation of cordic unit and its applications

The ubiquity of DSP has made increasing demand to develop area efficient and accurate architectures in carrying out many nonlinear arithmetic operations. One such architecture is CORDIC unit which has many applications in the field of DSP including implementing transforms based on Fourier basis. This report presents architecture of CORDIC, embedded with a scaling unit that has only minimal number of adders and shifters. It can be implemented in rotation mode as well as vectoring mode. The purpose of the design is to get a scaling free CORDIC unit preserving the design of original algorithm. The proposed design has a considerable reduction in hardware when compared with other scaling free architectures. The analysis of error for different word lengths and different input ranges for fixed word length gives a better choice to choose the parameters. The error in rotation mode for 16 bit data path, obtained for Y equivalent input is 0.073% and for X equivalent input is 0.067%. We also report architecture of a DFT core that is implemented using low latency CORDIC. A scaling unit has been included to get scaled outputs. The reported DFT core architecture has 22 adders in total, in addition to 2 CORDIC units. DDS or NCO are nowadays prominently used in the applications of RF signal processing, satellite communications, etc. This report also brings out the FPGA implementation of one such DDS which has quadrature outputs. The proposed DDS design, which is based on pipelined CORDIC, has considerable improvement in terms of SFDR compared to other existing designs at reduced hardware. This report also proposes multiplier-less architecture for the implementation of radix-2^2 folded pipelined complex FFT core based on CORDIC technique. The number of points considered in the work is sixteen and the folding is done by a factor of four

High-Level Synthesis of Digital Circuits

Táto práca sa zaoberá praktickým otestovaním behaviorálnej syntézy ako spôsobu návrhu digitálnych obvodov a jej momentálnym progresom pri tvorbe RTL popisov. V úvode práce sú popísané hlavné úlohy behaviorálnej syntézy spolu s knižnicou tried jazyka C++ nazvanou SystemC, ktorá implementuje hardvérové konštrukcie, dátové typy s definovateľnou dátovou šírkou a vie pracovať s časom. Ďalej sa práca zameriava na diskrétnu Fourierovu transformáciu a jej modifikáciu pre efektívnejší výpočet – rýchlu Fourierovu transformáciu. V praktickej časti práce je navrhnutý referenčný model algoritmu FFT, ktorý je ďalej vhodne upravený a prevedený nástrojom pre behaviorálnu syntézu Stratus High-Level Synthesis do viacerých hardvérových architektúr.This thesis deals with practical test of high-level synthesis as a digital circuits design method and its current progress in creating RTL models. At first main tasks of HLS will be described together with C++ library of classes called SystemC, which implements hardware constructs, notion of time and hardware datatypes with arbitrary bit width. After that thesis focuses on discrete Fourier transform and its fast form of computation – fast Fourier transform. In the practical part of thesis reference FFT model is written in C++ language, which is later edited appropriately a synthesized with Stratus High-Level Synthesis tool into several hardware architectures.

Efficient multiplier-less VLSI architectures for folded pipelined complex FFT core

Fast Fourier transform (FFT) has become ubiquitous in many engineering applications. FFT is one of the most employed blocks in many communication and signal processing systems. Efficient algorithms are being designed to improve the architecture of FFT. Higher radix FFT algorithms have the traditional advantage of using less number of computational elements and are more suitable for calculating FFT of long data sequence. Among the different proposed algorithms, the split-radix FFT has shown considerable improvement in terms of reducing hardware complexity of the architecture compared to radix-2 and radix-4 FFT algorithms. Here radix-4, radix-8, and split-radix algorithms have been used in the design of different proposed complex FFT cores. The growing popularity of adopting virtual instrumentation (modular, customizable, software-defined instrumentation) has only became possible due to the use of LabVIEW with a highly interactive process known as graphical system design. The CompactRIO programmable automation controller is an advanced embedded control and data acquisition system designed for applications that require high performance and reliability. The work explains the real-time implementation of 256-point FFT and finding the power spectrum using LabVIEW and CompactRIO. New distributed arithmetic (NEDA) is one of the most used techniques in implementing multiplier-less architectures of many digital systems. In this thesis, four architectures for different FFT cores have been proposed: • Real-time implementation of FFT using CompactRIO • 32-Point Complex FFT Core Using Split-Radix Algorithm • 64-Point Complex FFT Core Using Radix-4 Algorithm • 64-Point Complex FFT Core Using Radix-8 Algorithm The proposed designs have implemented in both FPGA as well as ASIC design flows. 180nm process technology is being used for ASIC implementation. The results show the improvements of proposed designs compared to the other existing architectures