FPGA-based Implementation of Signal Processing Systems, 2nd Edition

11 Adaptive Beamformer Example

The material in Chapter 9 highlighted the importance of IP in the design of complex FPGA-based systems. In particular, the use of soft IP has had a major impact in creating such systems. This has created a new market, as witnessed by the Design & Reuse website (http://www.design-reuse.com/) which has 16,000 IP cores from 450 vendors, and the open source cores available from the OpenCores website (opencores.org). This, along with the major FPGA vendors’ cores (LogiCore from Xilinx and MegaCore^® from Altera) as well as their partners’ programs, represents a core body of work.

A lot of companies and FPGA developers will have invested a lot of effort into creating designs which well match their specific application. It may then seem relatively straightforward to extend this effort to create soft IP for a range of application domains for this function. However, the designer may have undertaken a number of optimizations specific to a FPGA family which will not transfer well to other vendors. Moreover, the design may not necessarily scale well to the functional parameters.

The ability to create an IP core requires a number of key stages. Firstly, the designer needs to generate the list of parameters to which the core design should scale. The architecture should then be designed such that it scales effectively across these parameters; to be done effectively, this requires a detailed design process. The description is considered in this chapter for a QR-based ...