Browsing by Author "Mnisi, Caleb"

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    Accelerating the method of moments implementation on FPGA hardware
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2021-12) Mnisi, Caleb; Ludick, Danie; Barnard, Arno; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Engineering. Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Advances in transistor technology have reached a point where the physical limitations on chip design means that we are starting to approach a decline in the curve that used to follow Moore’s law. Engineers and Scientists are now turning to Hyper-Scale computing and parallel systems to be able to continue the trend of Moore’s law and offset this decreased cadence. This naturally means that the traditional way of running operations also has to be revised to facilitate implementation on parallel systems. This project aims to develop hardware architecture that optimizes the computation of electromagnetic problems using the Method of Moments (MoM) formulation on field programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware. This can be accomplished by exploiting inherent properties in the formulation that allow for parallel computation of independent sections, and then running these computations in parallel, using dedicated computation units on the FPGA fabric. FPGAs and reconfigurable systems provide a combination of low power consumption and flexibility for applications in computation. We aim to exploit the reconfigurable structure of the FPGA to help facilitate the development of the hardware architecture. The configurable interconnect of the FPGA also allows us to arrange the FPGA resources in a manner that will optimize the specific computation and thus reduce the computation time.