Aerospace applications of FPGAs

Two recent projects in engineering found the IDL working closely on tasks involving unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications.

• With Aerospace Engineering, the IDL was involved with the re-design of an autopilot board and consulted in the FPGA programming task.
• With Electrical Engineering and NASA, the IDL worked with FPGA coding for an on-board radar system for UAVs. 
  
  This task was particularly interesting.  The processing of the data required that five Fourier Transforms be completed in microseconds followed by a second dimension FT.  This task is perfectly suited for an FPGA and its parallel processing and algorithm processing capability.