This is an interesting subject to make Voting tamper proof. Such real-world applications reaching the common-man would make FPGA’s more popular. Click on link below.
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I’ve paralleled ‘FPGA Blog’ to a new address hosted by Wordpress to increase outreach.
Do visit http://fpgaconcepts.wordpress.com/
I’ll continue to duplicate posts in both the blogs.
Introduction
Most of you familiar with signal processing would’ve heard the term Hilbert Transform. We’ll call it HT from here on. There are other transform in DSP like Laplace, Fourier, Z etc which are more popular & used across multiple domains. Basically transform, as the word suggests is a mathematical process which converts one form of signal to another. Some are used only for purely analytic purposes (Fourier) while some are used for real-time signal processing like Hilbert.
HT ‘transforms’ the phase of the signal. It performs a phase shift of -90°. Yes you read it right, it is negative 90° phase shift. Generally, it is mentioned as a 90° phase shift without explicitly mentioning positive or negative shift. The reason is due to the concept of positive & negative frequencies. HT would phase shift positive frequency component by -90° while a negative frequency would be shifted by +90°.
Where could we use HT?
I’m sure there are multiple uses but the one I’m aware of is Quadrature processing. The term quadrature processing refers to dealing with In-phase, Quadrature-phase signals, i.e I,Q signals. I,Q signals are used for modulation & demodulation techniques. Quadrature modulation/demodulation offers many advantages over conventional approaches which can be discussed in another post.
For example, SSB demodulation by phasing method uses Hilbert transform to phase shift the incoming modulated signal to -90°.
FPGA Implementation (Xilinx)
Hilbert transformers can be easily implemented in Xilinx FPGA’s using FIR compiler IP. HT coefficients can be generated using Matlab FDA Tool. It is important to note that the Hilbert coefficient structure should contain alternate zeroes for FIR compiler to infer the filter as a Hilbert Structure.
Snapshot shows Hilbert Transformer using FDA Tool.
Generated Coefficients for Hilbert transformer
As you can see, every alternate coefficient is zero valued, which the FIR compiler infers as a Hilbert Filter structure.
FIR IP Core generates I, Q output (dout_i, dout_q in IP symbol) if the Hilbert structure is inferred properly. The output is -90° phase shifted. HT of cosine is sine and HT of sine is -cosine
HT is predominantly used in quadrature Signal Processing.
This post has deliberately come after a long gap as there are other blogs like the recently launched Programmable Planet which is far superior in content and substance.
Fast Fourier Transforms are almost ubiquitous for anyone dealing with signal processing & communications systems. Time domain analysis doesn’t provide us much required information as signal processing mostly relies on frequency domain techniques like modulation, up/downconversion, filtering. In short FFT is required in almost every design for either on-line or off-line analysis. For example, Peak search/scan is generally performed in spectral domain.
Xilinx Fast Fourier Transform IP Core provides 4 architectures. There is obviously a trade-off between speed (performance) & area.
I’ve considered an example of 64k (65536) transform length clocked at 100 MSPS & target data rate of 100 MSPS. Table shows the theoretical latency & resource estimates provided by Xilinx IP core.
From the table, the trade-off vis-a-vis FPGA Architectures is clear.
We know some computers use 64-bit words.
2^64 is approximately 1.8 x 10^18 - that’s a pretty large number.
So in fact if we started incrementing a 64-bit counter once per second at the beginning of the universe (20 billion yrs ago), the MSB’s of the counter would still be all zeroes.
~ Excerpts from a book on Digital Signal Processing
There is limited & scattered knowledge available in the programmable logic space online. I recently stumbled upon Programmable Planet, a website dedicated to Programmable Devices.
Programmable planet is undoubtedly emerging as the best online resource for “all things programmable” as they call it. It has FPGA, VHDL concepts explained by industry experts - now that’s something new. These experts are very much active in the website & available for comments/clarifications.
If you haven’t gone through Programmable Planet, I suggest you do it right away.
Here’s the permalink —> http://bit.ly/MTNMAR
FPGA Blog was featured on EEWeb.com as Site of the Day on 9th June. Here’s the permalink to the site http://www.eeweb.com/websites/fpga-blog/
