Design and Implementation of Time-Frequency Distributions for Real-Time Applications Using Field Programmable Gate Array

Abstract

In this paper, time-frequency distributions (TFDs) and their hardware implementation on FPGA are presented. TFDs are evolved due to disadvantage of Fourier Transform (FT), which cannot provide time information in spectrum representation. Time-Frequency Representations (TFRs) are helpful in providing simultaneous information about spectral contents of a signal with respect to time period axis. The major problem associated with hardware implementation of TFDs is limited on-board memory. Forward and backward register allocation method (FBRA) is employed to obtain the optimum register occupation. A register of length 32-bit is considered for the input signal representation. The stored register values are applied to the proposed TFDs and computed using real-time hardware. FBRA is implemented during the computation of FFT in all TFDs. All the transforms are modeled using Verilog code and implemented on SPARTA-6 FPGA. A real-time ECG, earthquake and a quad chirp signals are taken as input to test the designed TFDs. Finally, a comparison of different hardware resources utilized on FPGA with earlier conventional methods for better real-time applications was made.