M.S. Thesis Defense
Title: A Hardware/Software System for Adaptive Beamforming
Presenter: Albert Conti

Abstract

Multi-computer platforms that incorporate FPGAs and other reconfigurable
processors are emerging as powerful computing architectures capable of
exploiting many levels of parallelism for a range of applications.  The novelty
of this technology, combined with the drastic differences between
architectures, has resulted in a lack of tools for developing applications and
maintaining portability across different platforms.  This thesis presents a
case study into the use of VForce, a framework that leverages VSIPL++ to
deliver high performance for reconfigurable applications while maintaining
portability across different multi-computer architectures.  The case study is a
hardware/software implementation of an adaptive time-domain beamformer.  The
computation required for adapting weights and reconstructing signals is split
between software and FPGA hardware, which operate concurrently.  Run-time
performance is presented to show two orders of magnitude gain in performance
over a software-only system.