FPGA-based hardware accelerator of the heat equation with applications on infrared thermography

Modelling of physical phenomena often involves the use of complex systems of equations whose computational solution has demanding requirements in terms of memory and computing power. Among the different techniques proposed, the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FD-TD) method has the advantage of a feasible hardware implementation that can significantly speed up the computations. This technique is widely used for the solution of partial differential equations in a variety of areas such as antennas design, medical studies, circuit packaging and non-destructive evaluation. In this paper, we present a hardware accelerator of a 3D FD-TD heat equation solver that constitutes the basis of a thermal model of the soil for the non-destructive evaluation of minefields using infrared thermography techniques. In order to be able to work on the field during mine removal activities, a portable and computationally efficient system must be achieved. To this aim, we projected the 3D FD-TD model of the soil onto an FPGA platform using Handel-C and VHDL. A speedup factor of 34 over a single precision PC (C++) is achieved.

keywords: Circuits, Finite difference methods, Hardware, Infrared heating, Packaging, Partial differential equations, Physics computing, Power system modeling, Soil, Time domain analysis