Overview of Reconfigurable Computing Platforms and Their Applications in Electromagnetics Applications

• Published in: Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society journal Vol. 25; no. 4; p. 283
• Main Authors: Kilic, Ozlem, Huang, Miaoqing
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Pisa River Publishers 01.04.2010
• Subjects: Acceleration; Algorithms; Ant colony optimization; Antenna arrays; Computation; Field programmable gate arrays; Microprocessors; Phased arrays
• ISSN: 1054-4887; 1943-5711

This paper investigates the utilization of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in the acceleration of numerically intensive electromagnetics applications. We investigate the speed improvement by employing FPGAs for two different applications: (i) the optimization of a phased array antenna pattern by amplitude control using the ant colony optimization algorithm, (ii) implementation of the rigorous coupled wave (RCW) analysis technique for the design of engineered materials. The first application utilizes FPGAs as the only processor; i.e., all functionalities of the algorithm reside on the FPGA. The second one employs a hybrid hardware/software approach where the FPGA serves as a coprocessor to the CPU. The hybrid approach identifies the most numerically intensive part of the RCW algorithm and implements it on the FPGA. In both applications we demonstrate orders of magnitude of improvement in speed proving that FPGAs are highly flexible platforms suited well for the challenging electromagnetics problems. An overview of available FPGA platforms for scientific computing and how they compare are also presented in the paper.