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.