An FPGA implementation of the two-dimensional finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) algorithm

Abstract

Understanding and predicting electromagnetic behavior is needed more and more in modern technology. The Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method is a powerful computational electromagnetic technique for modelling the electromagnetic space. The 3D FDTD buried object detection forward model is emerging as a useful application in mine detection and other subsurface sensing areas. However, the computation of this model is complex and time consuming. Implementing this algorithm in hardware will greatly increase its computational speed and widen its use in many other areas. We present an FPGA implementation to speedup the pseudo-2D FDTD algorithm which is a simplified version of the 3D FDTD model. The pseudo-2D model can be upgraded to 3D with limited modification of structure. We implement the pseudo-2D FDTD model for layered media and complete boundary conditions on an FPGA. The computational speed on the reconfigurable hardware design is about 24 times faster than a software implementation on a 3.0GHz PC. The speedup is due to pipelining, parallelism, use of fixed point arithmetic, and careful memory architecture design.