An FPGA-based real-time radar coordinate transformation by jointly exploiting MicroBlaze and Programmable Logic

Abstract

In many navigation systems, real-time transformation of different coordinates is critical. This paper presents an accelerated coordinate system transformation method based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). A basic coordinate transformation was implemented firstly in the Soft CPU IP Core (MicroBlaze). After analyzing the calculation time of each part of the basic algorithm, time-consuming operations were transferred to FPGA logic. The experimental results show that the presented coordinate system transformation algorithm greatly reduces the operation time while ensuring the accuracy. The algorithm is implemented on Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA; the clock frequencies are 115MHz (MicroBlaze) and 230MHz (Programmable Logic), and the time of coordinate system transformation is 0.83719ms. Compared with the basic algorithm, the computing speed is about 13.3 times faster.