FPGA SAR Processor with Window Memory Accesses

Abstract

In the paper, we present a design of FPGA SAR processor with four 1D FFT processing elements, double internal RAM buffers and double external SDRAM modules. Without traditional corner turn phase, we propose a data layout scheme mapping one row of logical matrix into a rectangular window in physical banks of SDRAM in order to increase the practical I/O throughout between SDRAM modules and SAR processing elements. In addition, we theoretically analyses the optimal window size to minimize the total number of opening/closing pages when performing 2D FFT by balancing the number of handling physical pages between row accesses and column accesses. The experimental results show our window layout approach achieves 650 MB/s of effective bandwidth, reaching nearly 82% of peak bandwidth, with 58.1% increases compared to traditional Corner Turn approaches. The proposed SAR processor has been implemented in an FPGA test-bed, outperforming related works in both of computing speed and image scale.