Duration

Fundamentals of DSP

3 days

Overview

Digital signal processing (DSP) is the backbone of numerous technological fields, such as wired and wireless communication, military and intelligence gathering, industrial process control, medical science, cryptography and transportation. DSP algorithms such as spectral analysis and Kalman filtering — traditionally executed with specialised digital signal processors — are now increasingly carried out with FPGAs for their greater processing capabilities, increased chip-level integration and lower power consumption. The move towards FPGAs also mean DSP algorithms are now coded in hardware description languages rather than assembly, C or C++.

This course concentrates on the implementation of DSP techniques natively in hardware using Verilog. Participants would be introduced to floating point arithmetic in hardware, DSP hardware patterns, followed by parallelism and pipelining optimisation techniques for implementing high speed and/or low power/footprint digital systems.

Course highlight

Participants will have practical design experience using Quartus II and the Altera DE2 development board.

What You Will Learn

This course concentrates on the theoretical and practical knowledge to allow participants to achieve the following learning outcomes. Upon completing the course, participants would be able to:

Understand the relationship between software coding and hardware implementation
Convert software code to synthesizable hardware
Gain and understanding of digital signal processing concepts
Understand hardware representation of different numeric types
Implement DSP algorithms on FPGAs with Verilog
Maximising computation speed through parallelism and pipelining

Who Should Attend

This course is particularly suited for engineers involved in DSP using Verilog.

Prerequisites

Participants should have a degree in electronics (and related) engineering with an understanding of digital systems and FPGA implementation with Verilog.

Course Methodology

This course is presented in a workshop style with example-led lectures interlaced with demonstrations and hands-on practical for maximum understanding.

Introduction

Brief overview of digital signal processing
Number storage and representation formats
Overview of DSP theory

Algorithmic State Machine

Register Transfer Level notation
Overview of ASM
Hands-on practical: Developing ASMs

FIR filer synthesis

Representing filters with block diagrams
From block diagrams to hardware
Shift registers, multipliers and adders
Developing the control unit
Hands-on Practical: Synthesis of an FIR Filter

Optimising for speed

Overview of pipelining
Pipelining the datapath
Hands-on Practical: Pipelined FIR Filter

Implementing an IIR filter

Overview of IIR filters
Hands-on Practical: Implementing Optimised IIR Filters

Programme scope, delivery arrangements and suitability are confirmed during enquiry.