A Modular Mixed Signal VLSI Design Approach for Digital Radar Applications

Abstract

This study explores the idea of building a library of VHDL configurable components for use in digital radar applications. Configurable components allows a designer to choose which components he or she needs and configures those components for a specific application. By doing this, design time for ASICs and FPGAs is shortened because the components are already designed and tested. This idea is demonstrated with a configurable dynamic pipelinable fast fourier transform. Many FFT implementations exist, but this implementation is both configurable and dynamic. Pre-synthesis customization allows the FFT to be tailored to almost any DSP application, and the dynamic property allows the FFT to calculate different length FFTs run-time. Three objectives will be accomplished: design and characterization of the aforementioned FFT; analysis of the error involved in the FFT calculation using different twiddle factor bit widths; and finally an analysis of all the configurations for the synthesized design using a 90nm technology library. Speeds of up to 225 MHz have been simulated for a length-1024 FFT using the 90 nm technology