Introduction

The Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) technique is a powerful tool for modeling electromagnetic fields. Its basic principle is to discretize Maxwell's equations and sampling continuous eletromagnetic fields over a uniform space grid, thus obtain solutions for the fields in the time domain.

3D FDTD algorithm can be used on buried object detection areas. However, this method is computationally intensive and time consuming. Inplementation of this model in hardware will greatly increase its computational speed and widen its usage in many areas.

The 3D-FDTD algorithm we used for buried object detection was developed by Panos Kosmas and Dr. Carey Rappaport of Northeastern University

People

Documents

• Poster for CenSSIS Third Year National Science Foundation (NSF) Site Visit (SV), 2003
• Poster for CenSSIS Research and Industrial Collaboration Conference ,2002
• Poster for CDSP 13th Annual Research Workshop Program, 2002

Design Steps

• Simplified the code and establish implementation model
• Implement 2D Free space model on the Firebird board
• Implement 2D Free space with boundary model
• Upgrade to 2D model we eastablished
• Upgrade to 3D Fdfd model as original code

FIREBIRD/PCI Reconfigurable FPGA Computing Engine

We implement our design on the FIREBIRD/PCI board by Annapolis Micro Systems Inc.

The features of the FIREBIRD/PCI boards are listed below:

• Uses Xilinx VIRTEX-E FPGAs XCV2000E for PE0
• Processing clocks up to 150MHz
• Five independent memory banks, containing 36 Mbytes of synchronous ZBT SRAM
• 5.4Gbytes/sec of memory bandwidth
• 3Gbytes/sec of I/O bandwidth
• 66MHz/64bit PCI transactions

This page is maintained by Wang Chen (wchen@ece.neu.edu)
Last modified: Aug. 15, 2002